TRUTH 



BY 

SIR CHARLES 
WALSTON 




Glass .B.j J I 'If 



/ 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
The Next War 

Wilsonism and Anti-Wilsonism 

Demy Svo, i/- net. Cambridge University Press. 

" Prefaced with an open letter rebuking Mr Roosevelt for his dis- 
belief in a League of Nations as a panacea, this spirited pamphlet 
examines the objections raised to Mr Wilson's proposals, and urges 
that one need not be a Bolshevik or a Pacifist to approve of them." 

Spectator, Nov. 9, 191 8 

Aristodemocracy 

from the Great War back to Moses, Christ and Plato 

Cheap Edition (4/6) 191 7. John Murray. 

"Few of the many books which the war has called forth merit more 
careful consideration. . . . His long and varied experience, his scholar- 
ship, his residence in foreign countries, including Germany, give 
great weight to his judgments on men and affairs.. . .We know no 
recently pubUshed book which will do more to stimulate this social 
sense." — The Times, June i, 1916 

*'As a positive expression of what we must continue to call the 
Hellenic Spirit, this brilliantly reasoned sequel to The Expansion of 
Western Ideals and the World's Peace will unquestionably rank as one 
of the most truly hopeful works which the war has produced. The 
practical quaUty of Sir C. Walston's ideaUsm, etc/' 

New York Times, Aug. 26, 1917 

"The distinguished author traces the causes of the war, formulates 
the need of a fresh conception of morals, states the duty of tlje 
citizen in the present crisis, and outlines a scheme for an International 
Council, backed by force, for the maintenance of peace. ... It is a 
reason for thankfulness that the fruit of a mind so judicial, so well 
equipped, should be issued in a cheap yet complete form." 

Glasgow Herald, July 24, 191 7 



Patriotism : National and International 

Crown Svo. 2/6 net. Longmans, Green & Co. 

"Sir Charles Waldstein, in his book. Patriotism etc., delivers such 
a rebuke to Chauvinism as one would expect from a man of his cosmo- 
politan outlook and broadly cultivated sympathies. An American 
by birth and education. Sir Charles Waldstein has long been eminent 
as an archaeologist and teacher of art at the EngHsh Cambridge. As 
long ago as 1898 he advocated an American coaUtion, beUeving that 
England and the United States were the ' two civihzed powers ' best 
fitted by existing circumstances 'to draw nearer to each other.'" 

Springfield Republican, Jan. 10, 1918 



What Germany is fighting for 

Crown Zvo. 1/6 net. Longmans, Green & Co. 

"These papers show with absolute clearness the reasons for which 
Germany provoked, and is stiU engaged in carrying on, the world's 
war, as well as the undoubted responsibiUty, not only of the German 
Government, but of the majority of the German people for the War." 

The Daily Telegraph, July 20, 191 7 



Patriotism and What Germany is 
fighting for 

" Anything Sir C. Walston writes on the disturbing problems of the 
hour deserves attentive scrutiny because of his wide and diversified 
knowledge of social and international politics. His pen has kept 
pace with events. Two recent works (What Germany is Fighting For 
and Patriotism, etc.), following closely his notable A ristodemocracy, 
have emerged in book form above the large volume of his contribu- 
tions to periodicals. The fact that one of these appears in paper 
covers at a price of sixty cents does not diminish its importance." 

Carroll K. Michener in the Bellman, Minneapolis, Feb, 1918 



TRUTH 

AN ESSAY IN 
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 



CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

C. F. CLAY, Manager 

LONDON : FETTER LANE, E. C. 4 

NEW YORK : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

BOMBAY \ 

CALCUTTA [ MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 
MADRAS ) 

TORONTO : J. M. DENT AND SONS, LTD. 
TOKYO : MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



TRUTH 

AN ESSAY IN MORAL 
RECONSTRUCTION 

BY 



SIR CHARLES WALSTON (WALDSTEIN) 



CAMBRIDGE 

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1919 






Truth is one of the greatest material assets in the 
life of a nation and must be directly guarded and 
developed as are Life and Property. 

Freedom of the Press does not mean freedom to 
disseminate lies and errors. 







ERRATUM 
p. vii, 1. i^ifor page 98, read page 107. 



PREFACE 

This Essay (which is a supplement to my earlier book 
Aristodemocracy) was written during the autumn and winter 
of 1917-18. For various reasons, its publication has been 
delayed. Though the actual war has ended, this momen- 
tous change has not affected the purpose and the argu- 
ments of the book. In spite of the influence and supreme 
importance of economic causes which prepared for the 
inception and continuance of the war, as they affect the 
terms of peace and will dominate the civilised world for 
some time to come, I maintain now, as I expressed my 
opinions from the beginning, that the efficient cause of 
the war is to be found in the defective moral standards 
and moral education of the civilised world, and that Moral 
Reconstruction is at least as urgently needed as is in- 
dustrial and financial re-adjustment. 

The immediate influence of the war — in spite of all the 
heroism and self-sacrifice which it has evoked in millions 
of patriotic citizens — has been to lower the moral standards 
of the world, already defective and anachronistic before 
the war. To the previous inadequacies and defects of our 
ethical systems and education in pre-war times must now 
be added, among minor symptoms of degeneration, the 
lowering and coarsening of our sense of the value of human 
life, a necessary, almost logical sequence to all wars; 
the growth of thriftlessness and profligacy owing to the 
unsettling of economic and financial standards and the 
suspension of the laws and regulations governing contracts 



vi Preface 

and, in many cases, the acquisition of surplus income to 
those not accustomed to such affluence ; and, above all, the 
lowering of the standards of Truth. This increase of un- 
truthfulness is not only caused by the general derangement 
of social life and the unbalancing of nerves among the 
majority of the population, as well as by the growth of 
more or less justified suspiciousness against one's neigh- 
bours, when spying and illicit dealing with the enemy exist 
and must be forcibly counteracted; but it is, above all, 
encouraged, if not produced, by the recognised use of 
deception and trickery of all kinds as a legitimate method 
of warfare. The last and most distasteful outcome is the 
introduction into our vernacular of that hateful word 
" camoufla.ge/' used with nauseating frequency and grati- 
fication by even the most illiterate. Camouflage is the 
attempt at deception — lying — not by words, but by means 
of objects. It is an extension of untruthfulness which is a 
recognised and legitimate form of warfare. 

Thus the delay in the publication of this book has served 
to present us with fresh conditions which demand even 
more urgently than before the need for reconstruction of 
our morals as regards truthfulness. 

What concerns the life of the individual citizen applies 
equally, if not more so, to public morality. The numerous 
infringements of personal liberty and of higher spiritual 
morality, made necessary by the pressing expediency of 
war, have in innumerable cases, set expediency above 
morality. The enactment by what has popularly been 
summarised under the name of an interfering and not too 
scrupulous '^person" called "Dora," however justified by 
the exceptional necessities of war, has not infrequently led 



Preface vii 

to the suppression of truth and even to the direct en- 
couragement of deception. The activity of the Censorship, 
private and pubHc, has tended in the same direction. Some 
time must elapse, even after the suspension of the censor- 
ship, for the tradition of scrupulous recognition of the 
sanctity of private information by word and in letters to 
be re-established among us, as well as the straightforward 
adherence to truth and nothing but the truth. The same 
applies emphatically to the great organ of publicity, the 
Press. Its power of suppressing facts and, positively, of 
producing ''stunts," which, to say the least, present facts 
or whole groups of facts out of all proportion, has grown 
inordinately and asserted itself as a fixed tradition during 
this time of war. The crying need for action to regulate 
this most powerful and most dangerous institution in 
modern life, to which I have devoted much of the space 
in this book, can hardly be overstated. 

In view of the fact that (page ^j 1 single out one of the 
leading journalists of the world to illustrate one of the 
most glaring defects in our system of publicity and the 
absurdity of established traditions as regards the personal 
and, at the same time, irresponsible power of such journal- 
ists, I desire here to bear testimony to the patriotic inten- 
tions of Lord NorthcHffe and to the important work in 
many directions achieved by him during the war. It is 
possible that, in the future, history may confirm the claim 
which he may have estabhshed to the gratitude of the 
country. But the system itself remains wrong and a 
growing evil. 

In the Appendix I have reprinted extracts from previous 
books and articles by me dealing with some of the subjects 



viii Preface 

treated in the book itself. I have done this because I be- 
heve that it strengthens the argument to show that the 
same conclusions were arrived at in earlier years under 
essentially different conditions and from an independent 
point of view. But I should hke to draw especial attention 
to the fact that the praise which was in earlier years be- 
stowed upon the scientific spirit prevailing in German 
universities and in their whole educational system, applied 
to the Germany of old and not to the Germany of modern 
Streberthum. The advent of the latter regime I endeavoured 
to indicate in my book Aristodemocracy. The older spirit of 
scientific thoroughness, we hope, is not wholly dead even 
now. Its dechne in more recent years has been pointed out 
on various occasions and quite recently by leading Germans 
of the "old school." This moral and intellectual degenera- 
tion began with Bismarck. I may claim to have recognised 
this process of degeneration in what I wrote about thirty 
years ago ; but most clearly in my little book. The Expan- 
sion of Western Ideals and the World's Peace, published in 
1899, from which I may be allowed to quote the following 
passages (pp. 139 seq.) : 

. . .But again there turned up a great man of action who, 
knowing his countrymen and the trend of the times, utilized 
all these currents to weld together the separate blocks, — 
smoothly poUshed and florid marbles of prince-ridden princi- 
palities and clumsy unhewn stones and rubble stones of in- 
dependent cities or towns, — the huge edifice of the German 
Empire. The scientific spirit which was pervading the civiUzed 
world of Western Europe was recognised by Bismarck as a 
useful force which could be turned into practical advantage for 
the great purpose he had in view. He called upon the German 
professor — even the ethnologist, philologist and historian — and 



( 



Preface ix 

they obeyed his commands with readiness and alacrity. The 
theoretical and scientific lever with which these huge building 
blocks were to be raised in order to construct the German 
Empire was to be the scientific establishment of the unity of 
the German people based upon the unity of Germanic races. 
An historical basis for German unity was not enough; an 
ethnological, racial unity had to be established. The historical 
and philological literature of German University professors 
belonging to the time of Bismarck's ascendancy, can almost be 
recognised and classified by their relation to the problem of 
establishing, fixing, and distinguishing from those of other 
races, the laws and customs, literature, languages and religions, 
the life and thought, the productions and aspirations of the 
Germanic race. ...The distinctive feature in this modem 
version of the old story of national lust of power is that it now 
assumed a more serious and stately garb of historical justice in 
the pedantic pretensions of its inaccurate ethnological theories. 
The absurdity of any application of such ethnological theories 
to the practical politics of modem nations at once becomes 
manifest when an attempt is made to classify inhabitants of 
any one of these western nations by means of such racial dis- 
tinctions. What becomes of the racial unity of the present 
German Empire if we consider the Slavs of Prussia, the Wends 
in the North and the tangle of different racial occupations and 
interminglings during the last thousand years within every 
portion of the German country?. . .But the German professor 
with his political brief wrapped round the lecture notes within 
the oilcloth portfolio, pressed between his broadcloth sleeve and 
ribs, as he walks to his lecture-room, was forced further afield 
and deeper down in his "scientific" distinctions. The divisions 
he established for the purposes of national policy were but 
minor sub-divisions of broader ethnological distinctions. Here 
the philologist took the lead and established "beyond all 
doubt" the difference, nay, the antagonism, between the Arian 
and Semitic, which makes the Hindoo more closely related to 
the German and Saxon than these are to Spinoza, Mendelssohn 
and Heine, Carl Marx and Disraeli. . . . 

w. T. b 



X Preface 

Since Bismarck's time the falsification of humanistic 
studies, especially History and the "Science of Politik" 
to uphold the German theory of the State, of Autocracy, 
Bureaucracy, Militarism, as well as the "Ethics of Might," 
has been amply demonstrated in recent publications. 

But, with the growth of Real Politik since Bismarck, the 
predominance of the one aim, — to increase material pros- 
perity, industrial and commercial, — has led to the lowering 
of the purely scientific spirit of natural and physical science 
which formerly ruled their Universities and, through them, 
their whole educational system down to the elementary 
Schools. The University has been affected by the Poly- 
technic and Technical High School. Modern German 
Streberthum has effectually lowered the standards of their 
scientific and educational system, and this has of late years 
been admitted by the best representatives of German 
thought, who have had the courage to oppose the current 
of political and mihtary domination responsible for this 
war. It is the older valuation of Theoretical Truth which 
formerly flourished in Germany from which we can learn. 
In the domain of Practical Truth, in political and social 
life, as developed by our political and social traditions and 
favoured by the spirit of fair-play in our national spOrts 
and pastimes, the Germans and all nations on the Continent 
of Europe can learn from us and from the people of 
the United States — in fact from all Enghsh-speaking 
nations. 

I have gratefully to acknowledge the help given me in 
advice and criticism by various friends. My colleagues. 
Professor J. B. Bury and Mr N. Wedd, Fellows of King's 
College, Cambridge, as well as Mr Sydney Brooks (especi- 



Preface xi 

ally as regards the part dealing with JournaHsm and Pub- 
licity) have made most valuable suggestions. The same 
applies to my wife and to my friend, Mr George Leveson 
Gower, who have again helped me in seeing the book 
through the press; while my step-daughter, Dorothy 
Seligman, has given efficient secretarial help. I must also 
thank the Editor of the Nineteenth Century and After for 
the kind permission to reprint the article "The Kaiser and 
the ' Will to ... ' The need for universal Moral Reconstruc- 
tion" which appeared in the January number of that 
review. 

C. W. 

Newton Hall, Newton, 
Cambridge. 

February, 191 9. 



62 



CONTENTS 



Preface 
Introduction 



PAGE 
V 



PART I. 





TRUTH IN THE LIFE OF THE INDIVIDUAL 




CHAP 


• 


I. 


Truth as a National Tradition . . . 1 1 


II. 


National Education in Truth 






21 


III. 


Theoretical Truth 






23 


IV. 


Practical Truth . . . . 






34 


V. 


Honesty 






35 


VI. 


Efficiency .... 






51 


VII. 


Justice and Charity 






59 


VIU. 


Trustworthiness .... 
PART II. 






68 



PUBLIC VERACITY 

I. General Importance of Public Veracity 

II. Truth in International Relationships 

III. Truth in Domestic Politics . 

IV. The Politician 

V. The Millionaire 

VI. The Professional Journalist 



79 
83 
87 
97 
105 

113 



xiv Contents 

CHAP. PAGE 

VII. The Ideal Journalist 117 

VIII. Critical Examination of this Ideal of 

Journalism 122 

IX. "Reconstruction" of Journalism by the 

State 132 

X. "Reconstruction" of Journalism from With- 
in 151 

PART III. 

Religious Truth . . . . . • ^57 

appendix 

I. The Ideal of a University . . . .167 

II. Science and Empiricism, Theory and Prac- 
tice 182 

III. Educational Reform 194 

IV. Modesty 199 

V. The Kaiser and " the Will to. . ." . . 213 



TRUTH 



INTRODUCTION 

The longer, and I may perhaps hope, the more enduring 
part of my book Aristodemocracy'^ is occupied with the at- 
tempted reconstruction of our ethical system. The essential 
and differentiating feature of this ethical system consists in 
the supreme demand which it puts forward for each period 
in the history of humanity — whether counted by decades or 
by centuries — to formulate anew and clearly, without bias 
and without being determined by existing religious dogmas 
and current social conventions, not only its own ethical 
codes, but also the summary ideal of man, the Ideal of the 
Gentleman. This is to ensure progress for humanity, i.e. 
normal moral, social and political evolution. But this evo- 
lution is not to be "fatalistic " i.e. entirely dependent upon 
forces of nature acting through the organism or the environ- 
ment and leading to the survival of the fittest; but it is to 
be Conscious Evolution, i.e. guided by man's reason, his 
sense of truth and justice, his charity, even his sense of 
beauty — all these forces of the human mind permeating 
imagination, which is the motive, creative and progressive 
power in the human soul. This conscious ethical evolution 
is to be applied, not only to individual man, but also to 
social groups and to political organisations. 

^ Avistodemocvacy, From the Great War back to Moses, Christ and 
Plato, London, 1916, New York, 1917. 



z Introduction 

^ If a definite name is to be given to this system 

Pvactical 

Idealism and of pliilosopliy it had best be termed Prachcal 

Conscious Idealism, euided by Conscious Evolution and 
Involution. . 

subordinated to the Philosophy of Harmonism. 

Its essence and importance, as a guide to human conduct, 

consist above all in the correct formulation and application 

of the right ultimate ideals. We are convinced that if these 

ultimate ideals (the final goal and beacon-light in man's 

wandering through life) are wrong, the whole journey loses 

its correct bearing and direction. Our ultimate ideals are 

thus of supreme practical importance even in individual and 

immediate action. But the recognition of this importance 

does not in any way lead us at once and prematurely to 

insist upon, or to expect, the realization of what is ultimate. 

Having determined the true nature and clear recognisability 

of his ideals, and fixed them as guiding stars for the distant 

future, man must concentrate his attention and his effort on 

the proximate ideals. 

I might be allowed here to quote a passage from a previous 

work^ where this same question is dealt with. 

If it be thought, by some who pride themselves upon possess- 
ing a sober and practical mind, that these Expansionist ideals 
a,re rather vague and remote as forces which directly move the 
interested action of a nation, and have no power to check its 
aggressive action when passionate interest strongly urges it on 
in the wrong direction; if they doubt whether these ideals are 
sufficiently proximate and tangible to enter into the conscious 
life of the individual and to affect his actions, I will sin against 
the dictates of good taste and will make a personal confession, 
confident as I am that there are thousands who feel as I do. 

So far from being remote and ineffectual, I solemnly declare 

^ The Expansion of Western Ideals and the World's Peace, London 
and New York, 1899, pp. 10 1 seq. 



Introduction 3 

that these ideals with regard to the aims of Western civilisa- 
tion form the foundation of my conscious existence even in the 
most practical aspects of my life. That, if I were not aware of 
their existence at the base of my consciousness, I could not 
pursue the vocation of life to which I have hitherto devoted 
myself, and by means of which I gain my subsistence. If I did 
not beUeve that ultimately all individual efforts culminate in 
the increase and strengthening, as well as in the diffusion, of 
Western civilisation and its highest and most subtle attain- 
ments, the best that man's intelligent effort has yet devised, — 
I should wish to spend my life in lotus-eating, if not to seek 
peace in Nirvana. 

As I have arrived at this lofty sphere of aspiration, I will 
draw one last conclusion in the direction of ideals from the 
policy of Expansion as it ought to be followed by the United 
States; and I do this at the risk of being considered a "mere 
dreamer," But there are different kinds of dreamers; there are 
rational and irrational dreamers. Those who have succeeded in 
attaining the highest achievements in the w^orld's history might 
all be called, and generally were called, dreamers. No man — 
and for that matter no nation — can do great things unless his 
imagination can produce, and hold up both before the intense 
discriminating power of his intellect, and before the untiring 
and unflinching energy of his will, some great ultimate goal to 
lofty endeavour. In so far all great men are idealists. But the 
difference between these idealists and the mere dreamers is 
that the latter spend their lives in the contemplation of their 
ideals, whereas to the former the ideals illuminate their lives. 
The dreamer gazes upon the brilliant sun until his vision is 
dimmed, and his whole brain lapses into an hypnotic state. 
The world outside the immediate radius of this brilliant sun is 
one great darkness, and he expends the weakened energy which 
is left to his somnolent nature in railing at this darkness and 
despising it. He is even unable to detect the lighter shades and 
half-tones, the infinite gradations which lie between the bril- 
liancy of his distant sun and the darkness before and behind 
his feet. The idealist, on the other hand, having raised high 
aloft on the pinnacles of existence his brilliant beacon-light. 



4 Introduction 

does not spend his time in gazing immediately at it; but allows 
it to shed a lustre of illumination upon the whole roadway of 
life over which it shines; and instead of casting what is im- 
mediately at his feet into greater darkness, this distant light 
searches out every nook and cranny of existence, and enables 
him to pursue his path unfalteringly, to recognise the size and 
dimensions of each object in his path, its power of faciUtating 
or impeding progress, of yielding or resisting; and, finally, it 
gives him a clear notion of distance itself. And thus he is 
patient, and not petulant, as regards what lies immediately 
before him, knowing that he has beyond a clear, lofty goal 
which lights and warms. 

We must therefore insist upon the real and practical im- 
portance of estabhshing these correct ultimate ideals. Were 
we to attempt to express this in the old familiar terms in 
which humanity has embodied its highest general concepts 
we should say that Duty, including Justice, is the funda- 
mental guide for human conduct in man's relation to him- 
self, to humanity and to nature. It must be tempered by 
love or Caritas in his relation to his fellow-man, as well as 
for the good of his own soul, in order to give emotional 
initiative and direction leading to passion and enthusiasm. 
Above these, reigns Truth, which is the foundation of 
thought and action, in his social relationships as well as in 
his dealings with the world of things and nature; while 
Beauty gives him the sense of proportion, tempers and 
modifies all his thoughts and activities into a harmonious 
whole and leads his imagination on to a world of ideal 
perfection. 

What we felt in insisting upon the need of the codification 
of modern morals has been put in the following terms^ : 

^ AHstodemocyacy , From the Great War hack to Moses, Christ and 
Plato, London and New York, 1916 and 1917, PP- 200 seq. 



Introduction 5 

What modern man and modem society require above all 
things is a clear and distinct codification of the moral con- 
sciousness of civilised man, not merely in a theoretical dis- 
quisition or in vague and general terms, which evade immediate 
application to the more complex or subtle needs of our daily 
life; but one which, arising out of the clear and unbiassed study 
of the actual problems of life, is fitted to meet every definite 
difficulty and to direct all moral effort towards one great and 
universally accepted end. It is the absence of such an ethical 
code, truly expressive of the best in us and accepted by all, and 
the means of bringing such a code to the knowledge of men, 
penetrating our educative system in its most elementary form 
as it applies even to the youngest children and is continuously 
impressed upon all people in every age of their life — it is the 
absence of such an effective system of moral education which 
lies at the root of all that is bad and irrational, not only in 
individual life, but in national life, and that has made this 
great war — at once barbarous, pedantically cruel, and un- 
speakably stupid — possible in modern times. 

The reason why such an adequate expression of moral con- 
sciousness has not existed among us, in spite of the eminently 
practical and urgent need, is that the constitution and the 
teaching of ethics have been relegated to the sphere of theoreti- 
cal study of principles, historical or speculative, and have not 
directly been concerned with establishing a practical guide to 
conduct. No real attempt has been made to draw up a code of 
ethics to meet the actual problems of daily life. Or, when thus 
considered in its immediate and practical bearings, this task 
has been relegated to the churches and the priests. 

I there endeavoured to show, while insisting upon the 
necessity of religion, that though reHgion and ethics should 
never be divorced from each other, they envisage quite 
different spheres and can never replace each other. 

I maintained that ethics with its immediately practical 
aims requires for its codification to be directly in touch 



6 Introduction 

with the needs of actual daily life, and has to be expressed 
with the greatest clearness, tested by correct observation, 
accurate as well as comprehensive, and by strict logic. 
I then endeavoured to present an outlined scheme for such 
a codification, summarising the several aspects under which 
ethical questions are to be treated under the following heads ^r 

1. Duty to the family; 

2. Duty to the immediate community in which we live, 
and Social Duties; 

3. Duty to the State; 

4. Duty to Humanity; 

5. Duty to self; 

6. Duty to things and actions; and 

7. Duty to God. 

Broad and schematic as this outlined plan necessarily has 
been, it nevertheless aimed at covering the whole sphere of 
human duties. 

But in revising the constructively ethical part of Aristo- 
democracy it has been strongly impressed upon me that two 
separate groups of duties, of the utmost importance in the 
regulation of human conduct, have not been dealt with 
adequately, or, at least, have not in the general proportion 
of the scheme received the prominence which is due to them. 
The first concerns the duty to Truth; the other, what might 
be called. Sex Morality. Though in several passages (notably 
on p. 222), the insufficiency of previous ethical systems 
dealing with Truth has been pointed out, and its importance 
implied, the crying need for a precise adaptation of the most 
general commandments against untruth to the modern re- 
quirements of a modern code of ethics, and the far greater 

1 Aristodemocracy, From the Great War back to Moses, Christ and 
Plato, London and New York, 19 16 and 19 17, P- 259. 



Introduction 7 

refinement of the sense of Truth, which our modern civilisa- 
tion calls for, have not received adequate treatment, and 
have not had assigned to them the place which, in the pro- 
portion of a general scheme of duties, they ought to com- 
mand. It is the object of this essay to remedy this defect. 

As regards Sex Morahty, although I have already written 
the essay on that subject, I have, for cogent reasons, de- 
cided to defer publication. I may however be allowed to 
summarise its leading character and purpose in a few words. 

Most of the duties which come under the head of Sex 
Morality can be, and ought to be, regulated by the several 
duties as enumerated on p. 259 of Aristodemocracy and as 
developed in the "Outline of the Principles of Contempo- 
rary Ethics," Part IV, of that book. The regulation of Sex 
Morality would specially refer to man's social duties and, 
still more specially, to the duties of man to woman and 
woman to man, as well as to man's duty to self. Their con- 
sideration would also bear upon his duty to the State and 
to Humanity. 

Furthermore I am strongly convinced that, whatever in- 
novations in the existing ethical laws, as regards sex — both 
in the married and the unmarried state — may have to be 
introduced (and these may be numerous and far-reaching), 
the family, including the home as well as the institution of 
marriage, will have to be preserved and even strengthened 
in its hold on society. For I maintain that the family and 
the home are social units of essential importance to the 
maintenance of civilised and progressive society. Marriage, 
the Family and the Home are the irreducible units of or- 
ganised society. However much in the future the evolution 
and progression of the social and political organisation of 
social units may remove the conventional barriers of the 



8 Introduction 

past and widen out and intensify the relationships of man 
independently of consanguinity, the family will still remain 
of the utmost importance and value, and the home can never 
be dispensed with, in spite of the trend of modern life to 
overcome all limitations imposed by geographical, local and 
physical conditions. 

To the same degree, I am convinced, must and will the 
institution of marriage remain in its essential features, 
though modified, as it will also be strengthened by these 
modifications. Voltaire's words, ''that if God did not exist 
.we should have to invent Him, " most fully apply to the 
institution of marriage. The destructive wave of criticism, 
which, from the middle of the nineteenth century to our 
own days, has battered against this stronghold of organised 
society, has not been able to weaken its foundations or to 
destroy the essential benefit which it confers upon civiHsa- 
tion. It has shaken, and may carry away, some of the more 
antiquated conventional outbuildings which have obscured 
the artistic beauty of the main edifice as well as its capacity 
for affording security and comfort to men and women; but 
it has left the central building all the stronger and more 
beautiful. 

. No doubt still greater and more radical innovations in our 
ethical system will have to be introduced for the regulation 
of Sex Morality of men and women in the unmarried state. 
Here the problems are as numerous and as complicated as 
they are pressing in their demands for solution. 

Many who in the past have dealt with marriage and the 
sex relation among the unmarried and many who are dealing 
with these vital problems now are men and women of un- 
doubted moral and intellectual sincerity, while some of them 
are to no small degree representative of higher philosophic 



Introduction 9 

thought. But, in most, if not in all, these "revolutionary" 
writers, I find two blots upon the escutcheon of veracity, 
or at least two methods of attack which rob their warfare 
of lasting victory and effectiveness. The first is a danger, to 
which unconsciously so many of these writers succumb, 
springing from the ever pervasive personal equation to 
which even the most thoughtful and self-detached are 
prone. The peculiar form it takes is that of finding justifi- 
cation or condonation for the satisfaction of their own 
personal desires in the form of philosophic generalisation, 
which claims to be — and on the face of it appears to be — 
emphatically impersonal. Even a Tolstoy regarded these 
fundamental factors of life very differently in the days of 
his ebullient and passionate youth when he wrote Anna 
Karenina, Katia and other masterpieces, and in the days 
when vitahty was diminished by age and when he wrote 
The Kreutzer Sonata and his religiously moral essays. 

A further disqualification which, rightly or wrongly, I can 
trace in most of these "revolutionary" writers, even — and 
perhaps especially — in the pure philosophers, is the patent 
absence of any claim to the widest and most searching ex- 
perience of life itself in all stratifications of human society 
and groupings of individuals. I mean the kind of experience 
such as, for instance, a practising physician, who at the 
same time is an acute philosopher and a versatile and 
sympathetic man of the world, might possess — one who has 
not only received the most complete and intimate confidence 
from his young and unmarried patients, besides being fully 
familiar with the social irregularities and misfortunes of the 
lower strata of society and its outcasts, but who has also had 
opportunities, within all the unfavourable outcrops of 
married life, to famiharise himself with all that marriage 



10 Introduction 

really means in the normal life of the home or in the minis- 
trations by the sick-bed and the awful solemnity of the horn* 
of death. Were most of the writers, who would lightty 
sweep aside all the traditions that have grouped round the 
Sex Morality of the past, possessed of such experience, I ven- 
ture to doubt whether they would cast out upon the world 
the crude theories with which their writings abound. 



PART I. 

TRUTH IN THE LIFE OF THE 
INDIVIDUAL 

CHAPTER I. 

TRUTH AS A NATIONAL TRADITION 

" Dites done, maman! En Angleterre c'est bien chic de dire la 
verite." {" I say, mother ! In England it is quite the thing 
[or 'very good form' or 'smart'] to tell the truth.") This 
remark was made by the young scion of a distinguished 
French house upon returning to his home after his first term 
at one of the great pubHc schools of England. There can be 
no doubt that this testimony to England's moral tone, spon- 
taneously made by a boy, is highly flattering to the Enghsh 
nation and is highly significant in the hght it throws both 
on practical ethics and national psychology. It may, on the 
one hand, indirectly imply, and bear some testimony to, our 
national deficiency in manners, our proneness to positive 
rudeness, and our disregard of other people's feeUngs, even 
among those who by tradition and circumstance are the 
leaders of fashion and strike the keynote of tone in the 
social life of a country. On the other hand, however, it 
undoubtedly is a testimony to the prevalence of a sense and 
a practice of truth throughout all layers of society. A nation, 
which as a nation, has recognised truth, not only as a moral 
duty, but has made its practice highly fashionable^, has 

* Cf. Aristodemocracy, etc., pp. 311 and 312; Appendix VI. pp. 421 
and 422. 

w. T. I 



12 Truth as a National Tradition 

thereby not only repudiated untruth in its manifest and 
gross form £ls a vice, but has effectively stamped even the 
Ughter forms of transgression, which may not always be 
devoid of social grace, with the brand of ugUness, repulsive- 
ness and vulgarity. The facts with regard to national 
character and Hfe thus indicated by a casual statement 
of a child, permeate to the very depths of national con- 
sciousness and direct national hfe as a whole. I venture to 
say that the England of which the French boy made that 
sweeping statement could not possibly have a Dreyfus case. 
By this I do not mean that there could not be found many 
individuals and groups of people in England who, in the 
blindness of their personal or partisan passion or even with 
forethought and "maUce prepense," would not have hurled 
imfounded accusations against an Enghsh Dreyfus, and, 
having made them, would not use every device to maintain 
their assertions even against their better convictions. But 
I cannot believe that larger, fully-estabhshed and organised 
national bodies, such as the Army and Navy, pohtical 
. parties, the organisation of definite reUgious creeds or whole 
social classes, with the active sanction and connivance of the 
Government, would have conspired together to block the 
way to normal legal procedure, and have used every device 
to bring about a miscarriage of justice. Not only would the 
national sense of fair-play have been actively potent to a 
degree which would have made such an episode impossible; 
but the general abhorrence of the he, of untruth in any 
form, for whatever motive, are with us too powerful a factor 
in pubUc hfe to have tolerated such proceedings in any of 
its phases. Still, we must always remember that truth was 
in the end victorious in France, as indeed no one could doubt 
that it must eventually be victorious in that great country. 



Truth as a National Tradition 13 

Moreover, no other country in the world could have produced 
individuals with such undaunted courage and passionate 
fervour of diction, as was the case with Zola in his famous 
indictment " J' accuse." It recalled the incident in French 
history of a century before when Voltaire, the greatest of 
cynics, stood up against the ruhng powers in his noble 
defence of Calas. Still less could any nation surpass France 
in producing so glorious a type of its courageous chivalry in 
the officer who stood firm in the face of the opposition and 
the menace of his own superiors, of the animosity of his own 
class, and even of his own traditional personal prejudices, 
"sans peur et sans reprocJie," as did Colonel Picquart. He 
was a true and representative son of France. 
Not a Qiies' It is not a question of race-heredity, nor one 
hutofTradi- ^^ *^^ comparative individual moral value of 
tion. Frenchmen and Englishmen which makes 

truth the more potent factor in the actual life of the people 
in the one country or in the other; but a question of moral 
education, individual and social, which establishes a general 
tradition and atmosphere, dominating public as well as private 
life, and culminating in a ruling passion which, often imper- 
ceptibly and unassertively, stamps the life of each country. 
This tradition and its atmosphere are capable of being fixed, 
sustained, developed, modified, weakened or strengthened in 
any given direction by national education in the widest and 
deepest acceptation of that term. The religious and political 
martyrs, the heretics and witches who were burnt not so very 
long ago in England and even in the New England of the 
Puritan truth-seekers, must give us pause when we arrogate 
to ourselves the exceptional qualities of truthfulness and 
justice which distinguish our national life as a differentiating 
characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race. 



14 Truth as a National Tradition 

Still the fact remains that with us it is "chic de dire la 
verite" and that, not only is the confirmed Har despised by 
us, perhaps even to a greater degree than he is elsewhere, 
but that we do not like or admire the man or the woman who 
owe their good manners and their agreeable address to 
habitual, though minute, sacrifices of veracity in word and 
in deed. The humbug is as unpopular with us as is the un- 
trustworthy person, or the man who is unbusinesshke in his 
business affairs. 

If thus we can claim that as a nation we stand 
National highest in the comparative scale as regards our 

Truthfulness love and our practice of Truth, close inspection 
comparatively shows US that our own standard, when mea- 
low among sured by our clearest and highest conception 

of what Truth means, and what in practice it 
ought to mean, in the lives of individuals and of nations — 
in short, the proportionate weight, which in the whole 
ethical scale of diverse duties, we assign to Truth — is com- 
paratively low. It looks as if, in the progress of ethical 
development, following the social evolution of civilised com- 
munities, this special duty had lagged behind ; so that even 
those who are most keenly aUve and sensitive to the other 
duties of civilised morality, have a coarser and less deve- 
loped conception of this group of duties and of the whole 
weight and bearing of Truth. They have remained satisfied 
with a rough and rudimentary apprehension of its nature 
and its dictates. Above all, they have not apphed the infinite 
diversity and refinement, which the scientific and intellectual 
achievements of centuries of human effort have given to the 
theoretical endowment of the age to be applied in practice 
to the prevalent rules of conduct in our everyday life. The 
result is that members of our communities in every class of 



Truth as a National Tradition 15 

life, whose morality in thought and in conduct in other 
spheres is comparatively high, exhibit in their lives, taken 
as a whole, a low conception of what Truth really is and 
means, and in their daily practice, are guilty of sins of com- 
mission and of omission in this one cardinal duty, often 
without being aware of the lowness of their moral standards 
and conduct. As a natural consequence the general tradition 
and the pubhc practice of society as a whole fall woefully 
short of the standards which our best thought should enable 
us to establish. 

I repeat: On the whole the lie is condemned and truth 
highly prized among us, we do not cynically admit that it is 
right to lie. 

One of the many evils of this war, certainly 
Effect oj the j^ot the least, is that the pubhc consciousness 

Wav on ^ 

Truthfulness among the belligerents and all over the civilised 
^Life^ ^^ world has been impressed with the doctrine 

that in war deception by direct untruth is 
justifiable. This does not apply only to ruses de guerre', but 
to the solemn assertions of the leading statesmen, often 
made with considerable unction and under the cloak of high 
national and humanitarian ideals; to the official and un- 
official press ; to the practice of the censorship, and to almost 
every profession of motive meant to deceive the outer world. 
If the records of our own statesmen may be considered 
singularly free from the direct sin of commission, I doubt 
whether this can be said concerning the numerous sins of 
omission which are directly meant to deceive. The com- 
motion on the surface of our pubhc life during this war which 
has thus stirred up the dregs of lower traditions of public 
morahty will persist for a long period, after the war until the 
stream of pubhc hfe can flow on in unruffled limpidity. 



1 6 Truth as a National Tradition 

Even before this, however, the prevailing traditions of 
diplomacy; of our Intelligence Departments with their 
Secret Service; of our twists and tricks of party manipula- 
tion — all had in our public life considerably lowered our 
standards of Truth from the highest conceptions of our true 
convictions. 

When we turn to private life the direct or in- 

InPnvate direct demoralising influence of the war in this 
Life. ° 

special domain of ethics becomes clearly mani- 
fest with every day; levity of unconscionable statement is 
only equalled by uncritical credulity, especially when it 
means the defamation of character of those prominent in 
the pubHc eye or even of our immediate neighbours. From 
the humorous and comparatively harmless myth of the 
Russians who were landing on our shores (who must un- 
doubtedly have passed through Scotland because the snow 
was seen on their boots while they were packed in Scottish 
railway carriages), there have been and will be found people 
in every walk of Hfe, even some of eminence and distinction, 
who furnish a whole budget of news ruinously defamatory 
of the character of their neighbours. The number of promi- 
nent people who were reported to have been incarcerated or 
even executed in the Tower is only surpassed by those who 
are actually traitors themselves or who have wives or close 
relations in the pay of the enemy. In every district of the 
kingdom, rural or metropolitan, grave doubts have been 
expressed, often leading to cruel persecution, as to the in- 
tegrity and loyalty of law-abiding citizens; while in many 
cases, if not in most, the motives of such persecution on the 
part of those who originated the rumour have not been en- 
tirely free from personal interest and jealousy, or in its 
mildest form, from the survival of ante-helium party an- 



Truth as a National Tradition 17 

tagonism. On the other hand, many a culprit in what in 
reahty is a heinous crime most disastrous in its consequences 
to the peace and happiness of his neighbours, was not 
actuated by any such personal motives and may otherwise 
have possessed most of the other civic virtues as well as 
chivalry. They merely manifest a gross deficiency in their 
sense of veracity and in the due appreciation of our supreme 
responsibility to our neighbours and to ourselves as regards 
truthfulness of statement and even of inner conviction. 

Though the conditions of such a world-upheaval in every 
direction in public and private life account for the intensifi- 
cation and aggravation of every failing to which human 
flesh is heir, and directly and physically affect the nerve- 
balance, judgment and self-restraint of the whole population, 
and must therefore be regarded with some leniency, the fact 
remains that these moral failings existed before the war in 
times of peace. 

In every class, in every social layer, in every 
Comparatively .. t it . ■, 

low Standards occupation 01 our common life, we must be 

in Time of struck by the comparative lowness of our 
moral standards as regards Truth. A village 
doctor of many years of extended practice throughout a 
rural district, which, on the whole, stands comparatively 
high in the morality of its life, confirms my own experience 
from his wider range of observation. He has found that, 
though there is but little actual and active dishonesty, theft, 
or anything approaching to it, in the district, though there 
also exist considerable helpfulness and kindliness, the bump 
of Truth among the mass of the population is often repre- 
sented by a cavity. There is prevalent the grossest bluntness 
and insensibihty in this domain; and the credulity with 
which the wildest statements are received and transmitted 



i8 Truth as a National Tradition 

hardly appeals to the sense of humour and rarely evokes 
resentment when even in a short period they have been 
shown to be absolutely unfounded. The same appUes to 
many of the ordinary business transactions ; and though, as 
I have said above, direct theft is unknown, imfaimess in 
dealing and even trifling pilfering are common, especially 
when the marked difference in wealth between the affluent 
and the poor seems to condone the offence. The only means 
of combating effectively such crimes destructive of peace 
and goodwill in village communities, especially among the 
male population, must be introduced through the medium 
of the sense of fair-play as a direct result of our national 
sports and pastimes. The directness and power with which 
these traditions act are most remarkable and, as I have en- 
deavoured to show elsewhere^, are a distinctive moral asset 
of the English-speaking peoples. 

If this is the case with our rural population, it apphes, if 
anything, to a greater degree to the traditions of our trade, 
from the small shopkeeper to the highest financier. Most 
discouraging of all, however, is the fact that, in what are 
called the "upper classes," whose opportunities for moral 
education are of the best, the development of the sense of 
truth and the duties which it imposes is comparatively most 
rudimentary. People who would never dream of telling a 
direct He to further their own interest or to escape from 
reproval or responsibihty, have no hesitation in light- 
heartedly contributing to what may take the form of gross 
slander, to disseminate and actively to confirm its nefarious 
influence, or, at least, to support by the approval of silence, 
such a statement made by others when their definite know- 

* Cf. What Germany is Fighting for, ni. pp. 93 seq. ; and Nineteenth 
Ctntury and After, Dec. 1916. 



Truth as a National Tradition 19 

ledge would enable them to contradict it or when they have 
at least good reason for doubting its accuracy. Still less 
prevalent and less admitted and recognised is the responsi- 
bility, which every definite statement brings with it, of 
verifying its accuracy or, at least, of quaHf3ang its absolute- 
ness by an admission of the possibility of doubt. Still rarer, 
finally, is the individual who fully reahses that he has no 
right to conviction unless it is based upon complete evidence 
and adequate knowledge. 

I am well aware that, with an abnormal growth and with 
a constant and untimely obtrusion of conscientiousness of 
statement, even in the lightest matters of daily intercourse 
and conversation, we should come to the universal develop- 
ment of the "prig," to the destruction of all ease and grace 
of intercourse and conversation, and to a most dangerous 
inhibition of intellectual and practical activity in the ordi- 
nary flow of our daily existence. Such an objection to the 
cause I am here pleading would be unfair. The free flow of 
conversation and of ordinary activity in life would in no 
way be impeded or diverted by the development and refine- 
ment of the sense of truth. On the contrary, as the essence 
of truth is proportion, and as its apprehension depends upon 
the weighing of evidence and the nicety of touch in sorting 
and in distinguishing between the relevant and irrelevant, 
the possession of this sense to the highest degree in no way 
robs us of freedom in conversation and intercourse or blunts 
our lightness of touch in dealing even with the deHcacies and 
intricacies of life. To leave the abstract and impersonal, and 
to venture upon a personal experience in lieu of argument, 
I venture to 'maintain that, in my own past experience, I 
have known no man possessed of a keener sense of humour 
and a more graceful appreciation of conversation and of 



20 Truth as a National Tradition 

social amenities, than was one of the most accurate and 
painstaking truth-seekers, one of the foremost philosophers 
of England, Henry Sidgwick. It will always be just as easy, 
and infinitely more persuasive, to quahfy or modify a state- 
ment by whatever light and shade of doubt we may actually 
feel, than by making an absolute apodeictic statement which 
implies searching investigation and complete conviction, and, 
moreover, impresses a finaHty brooking no contradiction and 
making an end of all further conversation. But surely I need 
not further insist upon the evil consequences of misleading 
statements with regard to facts or mis judgments regarding 
the actions and motives of other people, leading to error, 
and giving force and vitality to slander and calumny, which 
are at the root of much of the unhappiness in the Hves of so 
many people. Nor need I further impress the harm which is 
done to the mind and to the heart, to the very soul of every 
person who lowers his own moral dignity by encouraging 
untruthfulness and coarsening the fibre of his character in 
the very core of its vitality. 



CHAPTER II. 

NATIONAL EDUCATION IN TRUTH 

Now, the fact remains that in our ethical education, this 
most important side of our moral life is neglected. 

Of course I do not mean that in educational 
Treatment in systems or practice manifest untruthfulness — 
Modern tying — is in any way encouraged nor that the 

injunction "Thou shalt not lie ' is not clearly 
impressed upon the young and implied in the intercourse 
among adults. But our conception of truth is generally 
rudimentary and has not kept pace with the evolution of 
thought and life in the course of centuries of civilised exist- 
ence. Its conception, adequate to the spirit and achievement 
of our age, has not been formulated clearly, so as to be 
grasped even by those who are responsible for the education 
of the young and who are the public leaders of the nation. 
Even if it had been formulated and perceived by these, its 
recognition and its appUcation to actual life have never been 
directly taught and systematically instilled into the moral 
training of the young or into the moral and social traditions 
of adult society. As it has been one of the main purposes of 
my book Aristodemocracy to establish the need of the new 
codification of modem ethics in general and of insisting upon 
the necessity of effective teaching of adequate ethics in all 
civilised communities, so I wish to demonstrate in this essay 
the special need for the thorough revision of an ethical con- 
ception of truth and to suggest the ef&cient means for realis- 



22 National Education in Truth 

ing such a conception in the thought and life of future 
communities. 

There are two main aspects of the subject : the 
Theoretical theoretical and the practical conception of 
Aspects of Truth. As this distinction applies more or less 

Truth. ^^ 

to all other subjects, so also does the fact that 
it may serve most useful purposes, the two aspects are not 
separate or opposed to one another, but, on the contrary^ 
interact upon one another and depend for the completeness 
of their apprehension upon the correct and adequate under- 
standing of each. Any exposition of the practical conception 
of truth, its appHcation by man to the facts and needs of 
nature, of life and thought, must depend for its correctness 
upon the conception which we form of truth itself, as we 
apprehend it to the best of our cognitive ability. On the 
other hand, its value for us as human beings is tested by its 
application to our life and thought, and we are bound to 
reconsider first principles in the light of our actual experi- 
ence. A study of man's history in the past throughout the 
ages has forced upon us the recognition of the changes in 
the conception of Truth as established by the various forms 
and systems of philosophy, science or religion which ulti- 
mately dominated the actions of those living in these 
several ages. It can hardly be an over-generalisation to say, 
that the ethical judgment of each age as a whole depends in 
great measure, if not wholly, upon the degree in which its 
life and activity approximated to, or harmonised with, its 
supreme conception of Truth in the highest manifestation of 
its thought and religion. We are also justified in maintaining 
that such an age was either healthy or diseased in the degree 
in which it lived up to these higher conceptions or ideals of 
conduct and truth. 



CHAPTER III. 
THEORETICAL TRUTH 

From this point of view alone it becomes the duty of the 

leaders of thought and morality to establish clearly in its 

purest and highest form the collective conception of Truth 

which each age has evolved. 

, . Now it has been one of the shibboleths, con- 

* Science." 

stantly proclaimed in and out of place in our 

own time, that ours is the Age of Science; and it has been 
assumed that this summary designation will in the future 
be adopted as essentially defining our own age in the history 
of thought. 

No doubt there has been in the minds of those who make 
such a generalisation the differentiation of our age from 
others which may have been called the Ages of Action, of 
Religion, of Art, etc. Moreover, in accepting such a general- 
isation, we at once stumble into the main pitfall of obscurity 
and ambiguity produced by the several conceptions of the 
term Science : whether it means systematised human know- 
ledge and philosophy, the Greek iirtarrjfjLr), or the German 
" Wissenschaft," or whether it means that misleading current 
denotation of the term in EngHsh as synonymous with the 
natural and exact sciences as distinguished from the humani- 
ties, or purely the experimental and mechanical sciences 
which have made such marked advance in our times and 
have monopolised so largely the attention of the thinking 
and unthinking pubhc. Generally, when the term is used on 
public platforms, not only by ignorant demagogues but even 



24 Theoretical Truth 

by distinguished votaries of Science, it means especially the 
chemical and mechanical sciences, perhaps including medical 
science with those ancillary portions of the natural sciences, 
chemical and physical, which minister to its advance in 
definite discoveries of therapeutic treatment. Even if other 
aspects of scientific investigation (sometimes even graciously 
including a shght recognition of the humanities) are not 
entirely ignored, the relative importance of these sections of 
physical and mechanical sciences is habitually exaggerated. 
It is, for instance, interesting to note that so bold, and in- 
genious as well as deeply searching, a thinker as is Mr Wells, 
reconstructs in his Anticipations the whole future of man- 
kind, the classification and gradation of human society and 
the personal, ethical, moral and intellectual modification of 
the men and women who will constitute it, on the basis of 
the decisive achievement of what must be called the 
mechanical sciences alone, and he anticipates that they 
have, and will have, some influence on the direction which 
the social evolution of the future will take, and even on the 
mentality of future individual men. This may be admitted. 
He even bases the division of social classes on the relative 
achievements in this one group of human activities. But 
the degree in which the mechanical achievements will regu- 
late social life is ludicrously exaggerated in the generalisa- 
tions of all these imaginative or unimaginative speculators. 
In lieu of an elaborate refutation of such views, in which 
innumerable weighty facts bearing upon the main question 
might be adduced, I will content myself with merely throw- 
ing out, as a suggestion to further thought, one simple and 
striking instance from past history, which I am sure these 
thinkers will themselves be enabled, by the rapid recep- 
tivity of their fertile and intensely active brains, to apply to 



Theoretical Truth 25 

the present question and to appreciate as a weighty argu- 
ment against their main generaHsation. There can be no 
doubt that the invention of gunpowder in 1330 contributed 
materially to the downfall of feudalism. But throughout the 
succeeding ages, smaller and larger communities and the 
civilised world at large have still been practically ruled by 
certain governing people who have not been dependent for 
their dominating influence and power as individuals or as 
classes upon their own direct share in the invention or 
application of such mechanical forces. In England, one of 
the most democratic of all countries, we still have a House 
of Lords, and neither here nor in other countries are the 
great inventors themselves possessed of the guiding or 
directing abilities to act as leaders in the social and political 
life of the nation. 

Nevertheless the generalisation that ours is the Age of 
Science, and, moreover, that the inductive and experimental 
sciences have powerfully modified the consciousness of the 
second half of the nineteenth century, as they do of our own 
age, is undeniable. 

No doubt we must recognise and value the 
^SuZ!^"^^ contribution to Truth made by the deductive 

methods of logic and metaphysic, and of theo- 
logical study, as well as of pure mathematics and those 
departments of applied science which come under its sway. 
But the achievement of the great experimenters and thinkers 
of the nineteenth century, among whom Darwin must be 
placed at the head, has, in the Hght of the present inquiry, 
estabhshed one supreme fact, both in its negative and in its 
positive aspect, which has essentially modified our whole 
thought and our conception of Truth. We admit and we 
can fully appreciate the pursuit of the purely deductive 



26 Theoretical Truth 

sciences and the justification and trustworthiness of their 
results in themselves, as pure logic and abstract sciences, 
but we have made the important — nay the essential — dis- 
covery, that where they are not trustworthy, and where 
error and all the fatal consequences attendant upon error 
may creep in, is in the application of these deductive prin- 
ciples to the organic world and especially to life — to man's 
relation to man and human society, to the spiritual life and 
its complexities. In plain words this means : that Truth does 
not come by inspiration, but by experience; that, however 
perfect the brain it cannot, of itself, discover and establish 
Truth; but that, for the understanding of life and nature, it 
must work on accurate observations and experience (in some 
cases even experiment) before Truth is attained. So-called 
intuition and introspection are not enough. For (at least 
in adult life) these deal with the material of innumerable 
unconscious or subconscious experiences, transmitted to 
some degree by heredity, but chiefly by outer stimuli and 
data accumulated at haphazard, without any method or 
accuracy, and, often, if not generally, forming a solid mass 
of prejudice and even superstition. It is in this application 
of brain power to experience that we find, in looking at the 
past, that mankind has gone wrong, and that it is likely to 
go wrong in the future ; that in this sense truth and untruth 
depend upon the application which is made of our deductive 
faculties. 

So much for the negative aspect of our discovery. The 
positive aspect (firmly estabhshed and fixed in our mentahty 
by the great achievements of the scientific investigators and 
philosophers grouping, as equal luminaries or as minor 
sateUites, round the central constellation of Darwin) has 
established and enthroned, as the ruhng power in the dis- 



Theoretical Truth 27 

covery of Truth, the empirical and inductive methods which 
are the final tests of its validity, even though the truth may 
be the same as that discovered by the deductive method of 
thought, which the modern empiricist is growing more and 
more to respect and to value. They are, as a matter of fact, 
correlative forces in the establishment of Truth. Nay, even 
further than this, — the more soberly and conscientiously, 
and with the supreme exertion of intellectual will-power, 
the truth-seeker curbs the impulses of personal desire and 
passion, of imagination and of intellectual and logical 
formalism, which constitute the Beauty of Pure Thought, 
the more is he able to appreciate and to value the synthetic 
function and power of the imagination — of art — and the 
more is he capable of reahsing all the demands of conscious 
human Ufe in its effort towards progress and in its establish- 
ment of the highest ethical laws. But the intellectual 
morality born of this i;iductive and empirical disciphne in 
the study of nature and of man, — of man's life and thought 
as well, — is opposed to all generahsation which merely de- 
pends upon imagination, intuition, or even upon logical 
deduction. It only admits a generalisation into the sacred 
precincts of Truth after it has passed through the narrow and 
laborious avenues of experimental test, of conscientious in 
duction; after the negative instances have been bravely 
sought out, faced and overcome. For these negative instances, 
when overcome, pave the way to legitimate generalisation 
and fix and confirm the solid dominion of Truth. On the 
other hand hasty imaginative thought and passionate 
diction, as well as remote and isolated deduction, dwelling 
in the attenuated spheres and pure ether where organic life 
cannot subsist, undermine the very foundations of the 
fortress of Truth. 

w. T. 2 



28 Theoretical Truth 

Now this conception of Truth, evolved by our own age, 
has permeated the whole of our national consciousness — our 
eihos — even for those who are far removed from spheres of 
philosophic thought, who do not even know what such terms 
as "deduction" and "induction," "experiment" and "gene- 
rahsation " mean ; and even though this conception of Truth 
be flagrantly disregarded or positively sinned against by 
many of the leaders of thought, and by most of those who 
are responsible for the education of the young and for the 
economical, social and political life of the adult population. 
Do and say what they will, and though they may turn their 
backs on the light which illumines the intellectual and moral 
life of our western civilisation, though its principles, and, 
especially, its bearings upon our daily life, may be denied, 
this distinctive conception of Truth has, and will have to a 
greater degree, a guiding and directing influence upon the 
morality of our time. In so far, the distinctive quality of 
our sense of Truth differs from that of by-gone ages. It has 
begun to modify our lives as well as our thoughts, and it 
remains with us as the most important duty of every thinker, 
teacher and leader of men to make its sway more real, 
effective and universal. Above all, we must boldly advance 
against those powerful and prominent representatives of 
thought who, generally misguided by enthusiasm, prejudice, 
or the passionate impulse of artistic exaggeration, raise the 
standard of one-sided fanaticism, and thus betray their 
allegiance to the stern-eyed goddess of Truth. 

I have endeavoured to illustrate the practical and ethical 
bearings of this conception of Truth in contrasting the 
influence which the dangerous habits of mind of two great 
men, Carlyle and Ruskin (possessing the defauts de leurs 
qualites), had in the past with that of the truth-loving leader 



Theoretical Truth 29 

of thought, Charles Darwin, the eager guide to the practical 
ethics of Truth in modern life^ : 

In the case of Ruskin, and in the case of his master in some 
departments, Carlyle, the prevalence of the relentless, exag- 
gerated, denunciatory frame of mind and form of expression 
has often beguiled them away from the noble course of sober 
and conscientious search after truth, absorbing much of the 
energies that are painfully needed to reduce to order the tangled 
web of the innumerable facts that crowd round the narrow 
gateways of conclusions justified by truth. It has kept them 
from curbing subjective impulses, strong desires and passions 
and prejudices, and of bending their energies to the service of 
the stern-browed goddess; it has lured them on to the riotous 
chase of the maenad whom they mistake for a muse. The 
prophetic denunciatory tone in its resounding flow may prove 
to be an easy means of shirking and avoiding the great task of 
declaring to men the hard-won truths that are announced in 
simple, diffident, nay, halting words, but still penetrate and 
endure in their far-reaching quality of sound. And ultimately 
the result upon such men themselves, and a baneful influence 
upon all who come within the circle of their power, is a general 
blunting of the keen edge of what we must call intellectual 
morality, that moral and mental habit which makes it im- 
possible for any man to state as an undoubted fact whatever 
he has not conscientiously tested and examined in all its bear- 
ings. 

There is nothing we would plead for more earnestly than 
moderation in matters intellectual. We are often told that 
exaggeration is demanded to reach and move the masses, in 
order that a general truth might become practically effectual 
and leave the spheres of pure thought. We are informed that 
minute and careful balancing of truth finds its place in the 
silent study; but that, when we go out into the market-place 
and thoroughfares of actual life, we need direct and forcible 

^ See The Work of John Ruskin, by the present writer, Methuen 
& Co., London and New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893, pp. 168 seq. 

2 — a 



30 , Theoretical Truth 

statements, figures of prophets and movers of men who stand 
out strongly as types of the one idea which they incorporate — 
comparative coarseness of intellectual fibre and passionate 
boldness of expression. Luther moved men, we are told, not 
Melanchthon and the humanists. It has almost become a com- 
monplace to say: not the sober student, but the prophetic 
enthusiast is required to effect great changes in the world's 
history. I will not attempt here to answer the question whether, 
if we look into history carefully, we shall not find that, after all, 
the moderate student was not more ef&cient in turning the 
world's current into lasting and beneficent channels than the 
\dolent enthusiast, and that the latter really only became in- 
fluential when he made himself the mouthpiece of the former. 
I should further suggest the question whether each exaggerated 
movement does not bring with it a corresponding reaction, 
corresponding in strength to the degree of exaggeration, and 
acting, in the long-run, as a retarding force to human progress, 
quite out of proportion to any temporary gain apparent at the 
time of the exaggeration ? If we must needs have strong preach- 
ing, then there is one topic for the morahst and world-reformer 
in which exaggeration is least likely to be harmful — the gospel 
of Sanity and Moderation. 

Ruskin has often allowed his feelings to run counter to the 
workings and injunctions of this higher duty. In the preface 
to the Seven Lamps there are " cases in which men feel too keenly 
to be silent, and perhaps too strongly to be wrong": he ought 
to have guarded most jealously against the strong feelings as 
often making it more probable that we may go wrong. The use 
of superlative adjectives condemning or praising, with him and 
with Carlyle, points to the same bluntness of intellectual 
morality. One thing or work is wholly "bad," another at once 
all that is " good." He passes judgment not only upon all forms 
of art, but upon the works of great and sober men of science, 
on the problems of these departments of science themselves, 
whether it be the works of an Agassiz or of a Darwin, the pur- 
port of whose work he had never trained himself to realise. 
Such exaggerations may, alas, from a literary point of vie^^ 
appear to be innocent, but in their effect they certainly are notJ 



Theoretical Truth 31 

He will, for instance, in Praeterita,ji, page 298, tell us, with the 
emphatic terms of a convinced authority, speaking of Sydney 
Smith's Elementary Sketches on Moral Philosophy, that "they 
contain in the simplest terms every final truth which any 
rational mortal needs to learn on this subject." We must ask 
what right his reading of that vast subject called philosophy 
has given him to pass judgment in any way upon it. And so, 
in almost every chapter of all his books, we cannot help feeling 
that this is a positive blemish, the influence of which cannot be 
good; and we turn with pure gratitude to his descriptive 
passages, where there is no scope for this intellectual vice, and 
where the good that is in him has brought forth fruit that will 
be the delight and profit of all the ages in which the English 
language is read. If, as far as intellectual example is concerned, 
we turn from the prophetic and denunciatory violence of 
Carlyle and Ruskin to the charitable and unselfish statement 
of a great continuous effort in a long laborious life, beautiful as 
it is simple, we cannot help feeling that, besides the results of 
the actual research of Charles Darwin, his literary and scientific 
example as a writer can but have a lasting and elevating in- 
fluence upon the minds of all those who read him for generations 
to come. No amount of denunciatory sermons can replace the 
unconscious preaching contained within the work and its results 
of the student who has honestly mastered a subject, however 
narrow its range. This is the highest form of preaching, if only 
for the supreme effect, the suppression of impulse and passion 
for an end that has no immediate bearing upon our own 
interests, and does not flatter our vanity in the elevation of our 
own position to that of a direct teacher or chastiser of foolish 
humanity, and above all in the jealous custody and possible 
refinement of our feeling for truth i. It appears to me one of 

^ "The development of this intellectual morality as a habit in 
individuals, and as a tradition in a nation and in an age, is intimately 
connected with practical morality and truthfulness; and there appears 
to me to be a strong moral and disciplinary bearing in the methods of 
research as applied to the natural sciences within our days, to which 
Charles Darwin has chiefly contributed. It is true, the inductive 
method was recommended by Bacon and insisted upon by Hume; 



32 Theoretical Truth 

the greatest blemishes in the work of men like Ruskin and 
Carlyle that, however high the position they may themselves 
assign to truth in their moral scales, the actual tenor of their 
work has counteracted rather than favoured this desirable con- 
summation. Bearing this in mind, we can recognise the good 
that is in Ruskin 's work, and there will be enough of merit 
remaining to make him one of the great benefactors of man- 
kind. 

I wish above all that the main point which I have at- 
tempted to illustrate in these references to Charles Darwin 
be not misunderstood. The influence of Darwin on his 
generation and ours, upon which I am here insisting, is not 
that specifically exerted by his Theory of Evolution as the 
basis for a Philosophy of Nature and Human Life and 
Thought — as a Weltanschauung — powerful as no doubt his 
work has been in our times, or perhaps for all times, in 
affecting the Natural Sciences and in producing in Human- 
istic Studies the historical or genetic methods in opposition 
to the mere recording of facts in nature and their classifica- 
tion, or the more static conception of man's actions and 
thoughts in the past and the present. In the Copernican 
era of thought such discoveries exerted the most powerful 
influence on "the Time Spirit, but became modified by 
succeeding discoveries or even superseded by a new Time 
Spirit. So Weissmann's researches and criticisms, the school 
of Biology identified with the name of Mendel and other 
thinkers and students may have modified the original 
Darwinian Theory of Evolution, until it may be superseded 

but it has only become a fact in Darwin; and through his efforts and 
those of his numerous followers and co-operators the general habit of 
mind which is developed by their methods of work has not only 
penetrated into other regions of thought and study, but it is modify- 
ing and raising our general standard of truth even in our practical 
daily Ufe." 



Theoretical Truth 33 

by a new conception of Natural Philosophy — a new Weltan- 
schauung, My introduction of the work of Charles Darwin 
here used in illustration is not concerned with this aspect of 
his theory and achievement, but wholly with his method of 
work, — with the process of experiment, induction and 
thought through which he arrived at his generalisation. 
The result of this method is here applied directly to the 
ethics of thought and life. As such it remains, and will ever 
remain, nobly efficient as a stepping-stone and guide to the 
attainment of immediate and ultimate Truth. 



CHAPTER IV. 

PRACTICAL TRUTH 

The supreme importance of instilling into the youthful mind 
the adequate modern conception of theoretical Truth will be 
admitted by those who are responsible for the education of 
the young, as it will also be realised by the adult that he 
must religiously cultivate and refine this conception in him- 
self. We must thus first consider Inner Truth, i.e. Truth in 
its relation to ourselves, and then proceed to examine it in 
its relations to outer nature and the world of things; and 
finally in its bearings upon our relation to our fellow-men, 
the social aspect, both in deed and word. To put it epi- 
grammatically : Truth in its relation to ourselves produces 
mental Honesty; to nature and the world of things, Effici- 
ency; and in its social relation, in controlling our actions to- 
wards our fellow-men. Justice and Charity, as in our word it 
produces Trustworthiness and Honour. 



CHAPTER V. 

HONESTY 

Not only in the form of moral feeling of a general character, 
but by direct intellectual precept and practice must we keep 
this distinctive nature of theoretical Truth untarnished 
within us and not defile it either by direct contravention or 
by compromise. We must be neither hypocrites nor hum- 
bugs; neither deceivers of others nor of ourselves. Our con- 
victions must be reasonably established, not hastily con- 
structed on hearsay or guesswork, nor undermined by 
personal desires and by prejudice. 

In forming our convictions we must mistrust 

ArHshcTruth, ^^^ ^^^ ^^^ desires and passions, but our 
Imagination. -^ ^ ' 

imagination and our artistic sense, which so 

often lead our thoughts to run riot, while in a milder mani- 
festation, they at least confirm a tendency to sacrifice truth 
and accuracy to harmony and syminetry of form, and pro- 
duce an intellectual leniency which is so well expressed in 
the French phrase " Enjoliver n'est pas mentir." But this 
restriction in no way denies the rights and the claims of 
imagination, the charm of the unexpected and even of the 
fantastic, which are the humour of intellect. These faculties 
have established their supreme spiritual right in the healthy 
development of the human mind, as in the civilised life of 
man Art is the correlative of Science. Nor need we deny the 
moral and artistic quaHty of mystery and mysticism, of 
romance and of all the pure productions of the imagination. 
There is truth in imaginative creation, truth even in the 



36 Honesty 

grotesque: they present the contrast to the normal, the 
recreative rehef from the dominance of sterner intellectual 
duty. In so far, they are not only admissible, but useful in 
their function : they stimulate and re-invigorate the faculty 
of reason and morality — provided always they do not defile 
the purity of the intellect by intrusion into its own domain 
and by snatching its sceptre or by assuming its garb. 

True mystery and mysticism are not to be 
Romance^^ found in the revelry of savage imagination, 

but in the idealism of the trained and culti- 
vated intellect. Nature provides mystery and mysticism 
enough in its myriad objects; in their origin, growth, decay 
or resurrection; and man's spirit, in the purest and highest 
form of its intellectual development, contains motives 
enough which lead and strive towards infinity along the 
paths of reason and truth (which themselves lead to the 
highest and remotest ideals), to respond to the love of 
mystery and mysticism, without bowing to the worship of 
the irrational. The worship of Athene is higher than that of 
the Maenad; savage man established the latter, civilised 
man, through countless ages of intellectual effort and re- 
finement and through the devoted life-blood of thinkers and 
martyrs, has established the former. Though in our sane 
moments we all admit the sovereignty of the clear-eyed 
goddess, the survival of the savage or the beast in us leads 
us to disown our allegiance to her at the slightest call of the 
raving Maenad, who drags us in wild chase through the 
woods and forests of primeval man, as she also glides 
through the slums of the cities and the gilded palaces of the 
rich and mighty. We then wish to escape from the rule of 
reason, though in doing so we deny our own self and the 
best that is in us; and by elaborate sophistry^ fixed in 



Honesty 37 

tradition, we often successfully endeavour to make ourselves 
believe that there is virtue in such apostasy. 

If admiration is one of the highest qualities of 
anTjV^r *^^ he3.Yt and mind, wonder is one of the 

lowest. Yet so strong is this primeval instinct 
towards change and life in the senses of man, that he is 
constantly straining after the new thing, the uncommon 
thing, the irrational thing, and the physical justification of 
this elementary impulse of vitahty is so strong that it will 
often attack and overbear the reasonableness and truthful- 
ness of the most highly trained and refined intelligence. 

All the results of patient and conscientious 
The Quack' medical study developed through centuries of 

mental effort will be cast to the winds with the 
beating of the drum and the ringing of the bells of the quack 
in the market-place and the savage who has thus re-awakened 
in civilised man exults and revels in the defection of kindly 
Minerva (whom, as a civilised man, he had patiently followed, 
and whom in this surviving savage heart of his, he hates), in 
order to follow the Maenad of barbarism and imposture. 

Though it may be right and wise in due pro- 
The Young portion directly to cultivate and develop the 

imagination in the young by encouraging 
games of "pretence," by reading fairy tales and by romance, 
it must never be done at the cost of weakening and coarsen- 
ing the sense of Truth ; and though the religious emotions, 
in lifting the child's mind above the sensual materiahsm of 
its daily impressions towards the spiritual striving of an 
ideal world, may be good and necessary, it cannot be good 
to instil into the core of its mental constitution the disturbing 
and unbalancing forces of the irrational in any one of the 
forms of religious dogma. A twist and turn is thereby given 



38 Honesty 

to the mind, in the earhest and most helpless phase of its 

innocent plasticity, from which it may never recover, which 

may unright the balance of its intellect in the apprehension 

of Truth for the whole of its life, and, in some cases, may 

sow the pathological germs developing sooner or later into 

insanity. 

If this be especially the case with the young, it 
The Adult, 

applies to almost the same degree to the mental 

discipline and self-training of adults. Superstition of appar- 
ently the most harmless kind must be discouraged, in fact, 
must be combated by the continuous exertion of will. We 
must jealously guard our desires so that they do not intrude 
into our observation of facts and our thoughts concerning 
facts, disturb their accuracy and dissolve their truth. Un- 
commonness and wondrousness in themselves, unless they 
are justified and strengthened by moral or artistic qualities 
and thus evoke admiration, must set us on our guard instead 
of attracting us into ready acceptance. In any case, they 
must stimulate us to an exceptional effort to test their 
justification. 

The man of most highly-trained mind, who 

LimitcUton of jia,s embodied in his mentahty all the achieve- 

Knowledge. •^ 

Acceptance of ments and results of science, is most modest 

New Truths. ^^^ ^^^^ ready to admit the limitations of his 
own information as well as of the collective knowledge of his 
age. He has been prepared by experience to realise how, in 
his own day as well as in by-gone ages, new discoveries, un- 
heard, even undreamt of before, have run counter to the 
established experiences of the world. He is prepared to 
accept new and uncommon evidence even when it is sub- 
versive of a whole group of truths and a consequent general- 
isation or even a so-called "law" which would apparently 



Honesty 39 

exclude its possibility. But it is not the newness of the dis- 
covery as such, still less its subversiveness of established 
experience and tradition, which attract him or favour re- 
ception into his own convictions. It is only after he has been 
convinced of the truth of the new phenomenon itself and 
after he has been able to fit it into the whole body of rational 
consciousness that he is prepared fully to accept it. For this 
body of rational consciousness has been established in his 
own mind and in the minds of his fellow-men, not only by 
the logic of thought, but by the countless experiences of 
innumerable reasonable beings through ages of transmitted 
and recorded thought and experience. 

To give but two instances; he would thus 
Wirel^s ' accept the discovery of the Rontgen Rays, 
Telegraphy, which impHes a kind of visual perception 

through solid bodies, and wireless telegraphy, 
the most startling "mystery " of modern scientific discovery. 
It may also — in the future — be the case with the recognition 
of "psychic thought-waves." But the man of refined 
scientific truthfulness gratefully and admiringly accepts 
these new contributions to Truth, even though before their 
discovery they may have contravened cumulative experience 
of lawful possibilities, because there is irrefutable evidence 
in fact, tested and demonstrated by experience, and be- 
cause, so far from contravening the laws of thought and of 
logic upon which our sanity is based, they confirm these 
laws by their rational position in the physical principles 
which science has established. It is not in opposition to 
the dominant code of scientific Truth that acceptance 
of such discoveries is claimed and granted, but under the 
supreme aegis of its guidance and in confirmation of its 
rule. 



40 Honesty 

But we must always remember that the spirit 
Science ^^ of independence and licence, arising out of 

the fundamentally noble passion for liberty, 
coupled Mdth the natural desire for change and the attraction 
of newness, is likely to be the primary as well as the ultimate 
motive power in those self -deceived seekers after Truth who 
oppose the estabUshed laws of evidence and science, and 
prematurely clamour for the acceptance of theories and dis- 
coveries which run counter to the dominant code of evidence 
and g.re far from being justified by experience and induction. 

This attraction inherent in new and revolu- 
^h^js^^'ftk ^io'^^ry theories may sometimes — though un- 
Commonplace consciously — be increased by the flattering 
'uncommon consciousness of distinction which comes from 

standing alone or in the company of a few of 
the elect against the horde of the undistinguished Wor- 
shippers of the Commonplace. Whether these be the effec- 
tive motives or not, the fact remains that sound and devoted 
research, which concentrates all energy upon the discovery 
of new truths in the silent study or the laboratory, is pre- 
maturely dragged out into the clamorous market-place, 
enlists a large body of vociferous coadjutors and adherents, 
eminently disqualified for conscientious research, often 
transfusing the scientific body with the passion of partisan- 
ship and, in any case, demoralising these unqualified in- 
vestigators in their own sense of Truth and their intellectual 
morality and sanity and lowering the aggregate morality of 
the whole community. 

This apphes in some instances — though cer- 

R7seatch ^^^^^^ ^^* ^^ all— to such a body as the 

Society for Psychical Research. In justifica- 
tion of the existence of such a widely diffused and popular 



Honesty 41 

body it may be urged, that it is necessary to enlist the 
interest and co-operation of the widest possible number of 
people in order to collect the greatest amount of evidence. 
But the inclusion of large numbers of active workers emi- 
nently unqualified for research is disastrous in its effects in 
every direction. Such people are in no way quahfied to test 
evidence nor do they possess the methods and habits of 
scientific investigation. Their co-operation is thus worse than 
useless, while their concentration on abnormal experiences 
with which they are unable to deal rationally is most de- 
moralising to their own mentahty and their sense of Truth. 
The qualities eminently required for such investigation 
are, in the first instance, those of the psychologist, especially 
the neuro-psychologist, and, still more especially the neuro- 
pathologist, the nerve doctor. To these must be added all 
the qualities which go to the making of the ideal judge in the 
weighing of evidence, and the most acute cross-examiner in 
the testing of it. And, finally, it would require the fusion of 
these qualities into the sympathetic mentality of the true 
man of the world, whose varied, if not universal, experience 
of life, of men and of women and of the human heart, en- 
ables him, on the one hand, to enter into the life and thought 
of every class of people, as, on the other hand, his vast ex- 
perience of human nature, its motives and habits of thought 
and action, would protect him against credulity and would 
constantly put him on his guard against all tricks of un- 
truthfulness and habits of self-deception in others. But, 
above all, there would be needed in such an ideal investi- 
gator the absence of all alien motives — alien to the imme- 
diate and exclusive discovery of Truth by observation and 
the weighing of evidence. Such disturbing motives arise 
from the passionate desire to seek for confirmation of the 



42 Honesty 

most elementary and justified longings of the human heart 
and mind, such as the desire for personal immortaUty and 
the longing for communion with those who have been nearest 
to our life and heart and whom death has removed from us. 

This kind of research would require to a most exceptional 
degree intellectual self-control and the inductive habit 
of mind which are prepared constantly to repress and to 
counteract the allurements of deductive thought. In so far 
it will be found that, even among men of science, those who 
have had to deal with organic phenomena or with humanistic 
studies which are inductive in method — with the problems 
of life and mind — are better fitted for dealing with such 
evidence than are mathematicians or those who deal with 
the inorganic world. The more their methods approach to 
those of pure mathematicians, — even though these latter 
are exponents of a sublime reahn of thought, unapproachable 
by the average mind of even the great thinkers in other de- 
partments of science — the less are they often fitted to deal 
with the problems of life and mind. 

I Venture, however, to say that for the general run of un- 
scientific people and, especially for those who have never 
been trained in the strict schooling of inductive thought, 
such active participation in "psychical research" and the 
dwelling in such regions of attenuated thought, out of all 
relation to the conscious and subconscious interests of their 
natural daily life, is most demoralising and destructive of 
their pure sense of truth, and may in many cases, lead to 
pathological abnormalities of mind and conduct. To give 
but one analogy (analogies may always be dangerously in- 
accurate and misleading) I maintain that the case could be 
similar, though not identical, if a wide and popularly founded 
society for Pathological Research were estabhshed among us, 



Honesty 43 

in which the members, free from every taint of medical 
training, were invited to send evidence with regard to their 
own pathological symptoms, to furnish material for the more 
effective study of diseases, and if all the members took some 
active part in the collecting of such evidence and the bear- 
ings which it has upon final and practical generalisation. 
Whatever results might thus be attained, one result would, 
to my mind, be undoubtedly produced; i.e. the increase of 
hypochondriasis in various forms of hysteria, as the con- 
tinuous dwelling upon ghost stories and exceptional psychic 
phenomena may ultimately lead to the definite disease of 
hallucination in those who, without preparation and quali- 
fication, deal with these subtle subjects. But above all 
I venture to hold that the healthy moral, as it is concerned 
with the sense of truth in the lay members of such patho- 
logical or psychological societies, is seriously impaired and 
lowered. 

Of course this is still more the case with all 
habits of gross superstition, and it cannot be 
urged with too much insistence that a grave responsibility 
rests upon those who thoughtlessly and lightly instil by 
slovenly and good-humoured example the poison of the 
irrational and the untrue in the minds of the young and 
among those over whom they have some influence — and 
even in themselves^. 

1 I may mention that it has been a distressing and disheartening 
experience to find, that in a gathering of friends of intellectual 
eminence, while playing Bridge, many will insist upon choosing the 
line of the hinges in the table, will fuss over the choice of seats, and 
even perform such capers as turning their chairs round three times 
when they have a spell of ill-luck. There can be no doubt that bad 
cards bring bad luck; but no sane man can believe that it is "bad 
luck" which brings bad cards. 

w. T. ^ 



44 Honesty 

Still more distressingly baneful is the wide- 
Spook-Habit spread practice of professional clairvoyants 
Habit. s-J^^i palmists and "mediums" of all sorts, 

which is not only affecting the idle, credulous 
and brainless people, whose unimportant lives are on a level 
with their low intellectual moral, but is also affecting the 
health, the peace of mind and the efficiency of those who 
fall under such influence, as much, and in the same manner 
as does the " drug-habit." Far from infrequently the results 
of such practices have led to most tragic issues, and the 
health and happiness of individuals and of whole families 
have been wrecked; while the frivolous half-approving 
tolerance with which striking and confirmatory instances 
are repeated, and even accepted, by those who are far from 
being victims, produces an aggregate mental tone in society, 
which effectively, though insidiously, lowers the truthful 
mentality of a large number of people. 

All these evil practices of superstition and imposture may 
lead to what, in one phrase, may be called the formation of 
the Spook-Habit. The Spook-Habit and the Drug-Habit are 
— if not brothers — cousins of the same original stock. As the 
Drug-Habit undermines our physical health so the Spook- 
Habit destroys our moral and intellectual health, our balance 
of mind, our judgment, and our appreciation of truth; while 
both together disintegrate our whole moral fibre. A neuras- 
thenic, hyper-emotional or hysterical person in many cases 
loses the sense of truth and can never be depended upon to 
do the reasonable, right and just thing. He may be kind, 
generous, even brave and self-sacrificing; but he may also 
be unreasonable and unjust, even cruel, mean and cowardly 
when "upset" or carried away by passion or by delusion — 
we might sometimes as well trust a madman as one of these. 



Honesty 45 

The Spook-Habit, like the Drug-Habit, generally takes its 
rise in small beginnings. An illness coupled with pain or 
malaise, a state of nerve tension with worry and distress 
may be relieved by an *' innocuous" dose of some mild 
drug. The habit is gradually formed and demands ever 
increasing doses in volume and strength until the man 
or woman becomes its slave. A superstition of the "most 
harmless" order ("say rabbit three times and you will 
receive a present," "the thirteenth chair ")^, the hearing 
of a ghost-story, or a shock or hallucination, quasi-religious 
suggestion^, the constant use of the word "unberufen" — 
out of all these seeds sown in youth, growing insidiously 
and subconsciously in the young mind, the weeds which 



^ It may be apposite to refer here to the play of that title {The 
Thirteenth Chair) which has met with well-merited success, for a 
play of that order, as I am writing. The imposture in the practices 
of the clairvoyant are well exposed, and, in so far, the effect of the 
play is wholesome. But it is to be regretted that in the last effective 
scene the author has given way and has rehnquished his higher 
standards. That the voice of the murdered man should be heard 
may be accounted for by ventriloquism as practised by the clair- 
voyant. On the other hand the door flying open at the critical 
moment and the murderer's knife dropping from the ceiHng, though 
conceivably due to coincidence, suggest supernatural inter- 
vention and in so far confirm the morbid pubhc in their super- 
stitions. 

2 Among many similar proofs of the unbalancing effects upon the 
child-mind of harmful thoughts and feeUngs produced in a quasi- 
religious form, I have heard from a mother, how she was attracted 
to the cot of her child lying awake in fear and torture and screaming 
"I do not want to be carried away by the angels," being told that 
angels carried the dead children to heaven. Child-hfe is not to be 
deprived of the brightness and charm which dwell in fairyland, nor 
is the imagination to be starved. But moral, intellectual and artistic 
food must be carefully administered to the youthful mind in order 
not to impair mental health. 

3—2 



46 Honesty 

overspread the whole fertile field of the mind at last sub- 
merge and kill all the healthy plants of a rationa} and 
wholesome mentality. 

But not only children must be carefully guarded against 
these evils ; our adult population must protect itself and be 
protected bj^ the State ^, from such disastrous moral diseases 
which often partake of the character of epidemics. Nations 
as well as individuals may be ruined by these diseases. It 
is not overstating the case to say, that the catastrophic 
collapse of the Russian nation is in great part due to the 
effect upon the people (lacking as they also do all political 
as well as general education), of the gross or widespread 
forms of religious superstitions which permeate and dominate 
all classes of the population. It is not only the barely 
civilised Mudjik who is thus ruled and obsessed by super- 
stitions of all kinds. There are "highly-educated" men and 
women of intellectual vigour and refinement, disciples of 
Darwin and Herbert Spencer or of modern German material- 
ists, who manifest the most incredible childishness in 
accepting, and submitting to, superstitions ; until at last we 
come to the tragedy, centring round Rasputin, with his 
nefarious vogue in the Russian court, gruesomely grotesque 
in its immoral, terrifically stupid coarseness and depravity, 
which crowns the last reign of idiocy and superstition and 
ushers in the lawless, absolutely unbridled sway of Bolshevik 

* The prosecution of all clairvoyants, palmists and similar im- 
postors must be vigorously carried on by the State. Even Hypnotism 
and Suggestion are not to be practised by unquaUfied agents. As an 
Anesthetician must be duly quahfied before he can practise, so ought 
those in charge of the important therapeutic department of Hypno- 
tism and Suggestion to be vigorously controlled. As the distribution 
of poisonous or dangerous drugs is regulated by the State, so should 
the drugs of the mind be guarded. 



Honesty 47 

*' liberty "still governed by the inherited methods of previous 

corruption and tyranny. 

To leave these morbid — and let us hope — more 

The Right to ^nusual causes of mental demorahsation, we 
cm Optmon. 

come to the most widespread and less mani- 
fest, though most effective, source of lowered truthful 
vitahty. It concerns the formation and the holding of 
opinions. There never was a more fatally untrue saying than 
the statement that "every man has the right to an opinion," 
and even that "every man has a right to his own opinion." 
We are here not dealing with expression of opinion only, but 
even with the holding of it. It is probably nearer the truth 
to say, "that but few people have a right to an opinion and 
only have a right to their own opinion when it is justified by 
experience, thought and all the tests which go to the making 
of conviction." This is one of the first and cardinal lessons 
of the ethics of Truth which are to be instilled into the young 
mind and are to be maintained in their fulness in the con- 
victions and mental habits of adults. When we seriously 
consider the matter it will be found that it is not at all 
necessary for us to form an opinion upon a great many 
subjects, especially when we realise that the means of ascer- 
taining facts and drawing trustworthy conclusions from 
them, and the capacity and training to deal with such prob- 
lems, are not given to us. One of the first precepts which 
should be inculcated in the young is the unequivocal ad- 
mission, not only to others, but to themselves, "/ don't 
know." The teacher and parent, and all those responsible for 
the training of young people, must impress this by example 
and must frankly admit their own limitations and their 
fallibility. There is no greater error — untrue in itself in- 
tellectually and morally as well as impolitic in view of the 



48 Honesty 

maintenance of educational authority — than that the main- 
tenance of authority depends upon an estimate of infalli- 
biHty which the young are to form of their elders, or that the 
authority is lowered when belief in such infallibility is not 
absolute. As this appHes to the estimate and consequent 
influence concerning the personality of the teacher, so it 
ought to be maintained in every department and in every 
item of actual instruction. The plea that hesitation, qualifi- 
cation and doubt produce uncertainty and confusion in the 
minds of the learners, is unfounded. No science, no depart- 
ment of instruction, depends upon, or is benefited by, over- 
statement. While the moral result and the intellectual 
training, the increase of precision in observation and judg- 
ment, the stimulation to mental effort, and finally, the pro- 
duction of an ethos, a general character of strong and refined 
truthfulness, are born from hesitation in judgment and from 
the admission on the part of the teacher, " I don't know," 
"I have no right to an opinion on the matter," or "I have, 
as yet, no right to an opinion." However important it be to 
teach those deductive subjects (reading, writing, arithmetic, 
geography, etc.) which form our elementary studies and give 
a groundwork of fact upon which the reasoning powers are 
to be employed, it is most important that the inductive 
subjects, including experiment, should be taught, not so 
much for their own intrinsic value and practical importance, 
as for the moral discipline which they induce in every 
child, whatever its natural bent or the probable future 
lines of study or work which it will have to pursue in 
after life. For it is through them that this moral process 
in the finding and in the justification of conviction is 
most clearly and effectually impressed upon the child's 
mind. 



Honesty 49 

The greatest care will also have to be exercised 
'^fHis^y^''^ in the teaching of history. For it is in this de- 
partment that the truth-seekers have sinned 
with most disastrously tragic results in the promotion of the 
"national'' spirit which has favoured the violent, unreason- 
ing and savage animosity culminating in this great war. 
Histories^ especially school histories, will have to be re- 
written all over the world. The. aim of history must be the 
establishment of Truth, not the production of patriotism or 
any other passion or quality, however desirable and noble. 
The duties of patriotism may be directly impressed upon 
the young, with all the justification which they possess; but 
the study of man's past must be solely guided by the desire 
to know the truth concerning his past and shall admit of no 
other motive. As the teacliing of history must never be 
biassed by patriotic or rehgious prejudice, so must the per- 
sonal bias of the writer and the teacher be carefully guarded 
against. In any case, do not let the child go away with a 
feeHng of finaUty in judgment either of the past periods in 
history or of the great men of former days. Do not hesitate 
to qualify judgments and to leave the child in doubt v/here 
certainty is not attainable. 

I shall deal with the numerous and important cases in 
which the need of immediate action and the choice of one or 
other alternative require the formation of an opinion, and 
the case where probability and preference must take the 
place of certainty and moral necessity. But where the need 
of action, the necessity to "take sides," and the duty to 
express one's opinion ad hoc, are not imposed, the right to 
form an opinion on insufficient data does not exist. 
The Honest Finally there remains the summary of all the 
Man. duties of man in the relation of Truth to him- 



50 Honesty 

self. "Know thyself" has for ages been recognised as 
one of the supreme moral duties of man. It impHes the 
necessity for positive self-inquiry. Still more important is 
the negative aspect of this duty: "Do not deceive thyself. 
Do not try to make others believe, and thyself believe, that 
thou art what thou art not." Among the most despicable of 
human beings are those who live a lie before others; but 
almost more despicable are those who live a lie to them- 
selves. The realisation of Truth in its relation to ourselves 
produces the Honest Man. The honest man is essentially 
the same now as he was in the half-animal existence of the 
early cave-dwellers. But, as the conditions of life have been 
infinitely multipUed and varied since the days of these 
primitive phases in human evolution, so have our powers of 
thought and our habits of thinking advanced and increased; 
and the conceptions which we hold of Truth differ, not only 
from those of primitive man, but even from the man of a 
century ago, nay, a generation ago; and it is therefore our 
duty to become conscious of this new conception of Truth, 
as the expression of the civilisation to which we have at- 
tained, and to live up to it. 



CHAPTER VI. 

EFFICIENCY 

When now we leave this inner life and turn to the practical 
life of the outer world we again find, that upon our adequate 
conception of Truth and upon the efficient habit with which 
it has permeated our observation, our understanding and 
our various activities in dealing with this outer world depend 
to the greatest degree, even our success or failure in life, in 
the business of life — our Efficiency. In this business of life 
man deals with nature and the world of things, but he also 
deals with his fellow-man in so far as man possesses, produces 
or modifies these things of the world, co-operates with him in 
common effort or competes with him in possession or control, 
in friendly rivalry or unfriendly struggle. Here it is most 
important that observation and understanding should guide 
action to a successful issue. Observation, to lead to perfect 
understanding, should be clear and unbiassed. Action, to be 
effective, must include the true and just apprehension of the 
relation of these outer objects to man himself, his capacities 
and his limitations in deaUng with these objects of the outer 
world. 

Practically the bulk of our educational training, all the 
phases of our schooHng and our apprenticeship, are con- 
cerned with fitting us for this struggle in the business of life. 
Skill and dexterity of hand, of our senses and mind, must 
be whetted and perfected in order to impress man's creative 
genius, his needs and his desires upon the outer world of 
things. But, however great his skill in the manipulation of 



52 EfEciency 

his appropriate tools, in all the technical process of work, 
success and efficiency above all depend upon their guidance 
by the human intelHgence which has accurately grasped the 
true nature of the objects thus to be affected, of their re- 
ceptivity to such work and of man's own power to bend 
them to his will. Practical and technical capacity is not 
enough to produce capability in subjugating things of the 
outer world to man's use. Correct apprehension, reason and 
judgment, are the guides which enable him to master all the 
conditions and processes in this technical struggle with the 
world of affairs. The truer and more perfect this theoretical 
instrument which guides the technical tool, the more likely 
is the work of man's hand to be successful. This means, 
in other words, not only that his faculty for apprehending 
truth and assimilating it with his own mentality, his con- 
scious and subconscious mind, should be healthy and com- 
plete, but, also, that his conception of Truth itself should be 
of the highest and purest form, adequate to the mental 
development of his age, and not borrowed from by-gone ages 
which in so far stood on a lower level of intellectual develop- 
ment and whose standards of Truth are, in consequence, of 
a lower order. 

Now it is owing to the deficient apprehension and practice 
on this side of education and self -culture that result all those 
incompetencies and inadequacies of life with which we meet, 
to the detriment of individual and public welfare. Wherever 
we turn we meet with such incompetency and inefficiency 
in the work of every class of society, and this inefficiency 
springs mainly from a want of thoroughness, in the first 
instance, owing to the faulty development of the sense of 
Truth. Such inefficient men have no desire to know either 
their trade, their business or their profession or the relation 



Efficiency 53 

which they hold to it ; and such incompetence will be found in 
every class. Most of the losses we sustain, the annoyances we 
experience and the resentment with which criminal pretence 
fills us are due to this want of thoroughness and efficiency. 
The artisan and craftsman, who, after imperfect apprentice- 
ship, boldly flounder into work of a subtle and valuable 
nature, unable to carry it to completion while destroying 
precious material ; the foreman and contractor, and even the 
architect, who, ignorant of the constructive nature of the 
material with which they are dealing, undertake an order 
far beyond their capacity; the manufacturer and the mer- 
chant who remain content with the mere business manipu- 
lation, which alluringly tempts them into speculation 
promising rapid acquisition of wealth, without grasping, by 
searching and persevering stady, the true nature of the 
goods themselves which they are supposed to produce or to 
manipulate; the shopkeeper and his clerk who know and 
care nothing about the wares they sell and whose function 
is merely idly to wait for a customer and then practise vulgar 
and inept arts of rhetoric and persuasion ; the lawyer who is no 
jurist ; the medical practitioner who is no true man of science 
and remains content with the empirical remedies which he 
has acquired in his apprenticeship, unacquainted with the 
true principles of his science and its progress, and therefore 
unable to cope with unforeseen conditions which the phj^sio- 
logical and pathological processes of human life are bound to 
produce; the politician who is no statesman, and the soldier 
who takes no real interest in the art and science of war — 
these are the curses of modern society, because they live a 
lie and know not what is Truth. It is this want of thorough- 
ness, this amateurishness, in the traditions of our life-work, 
which is our natiojaal weakness, as the tradition of thorough 



54 Efficiency 

ness was the strength of the Germany of old^, lowered and 
defiled in the changed mentaUty of the latter-day Germany, 
whose ideals of efficiency were established by the lowering of 
their conception*of Truth, — though whatever successes they 
may have achieved in this war have been due to the inherit- 
ance of the spirit of thoroughness established by the older 
Germany, which the wave of modern Streberium has not been 
able entirely to submerge. 

Now this want of thoroughness in our traditions of work 
is in no way due to deficiency in the element of perseverance, 
tenacity and seriousness of purpose in our national character. 
On the contrary, we possess these qualities to the very highest 
degree, as is shown by our success in all efforts which require 
moral courage and tenacity, even in our industrial and com- 
mercial life as well as in our enterprise as a seafaring and 
colonising nation, and our ultimate success in the struggle 
with other nations both in peace and in war. It is due, not 
to the want of force, but to the want of direction in which 
this force is used, to the irrational traditions, to the un- 
willingness — ^in fact to the direct dislike — of the national 
genius to face and to grasp theory and all that is abstract. 
These national habits and traditions have produced what 
Meredith called "England's hatred of thought." We remain 
satisfied with the hand-to-mouth process of evolving our 
theory out of our practice, of raising "expediency" to the 
highest level of our intellectual aspirations, and of practising 
an opportunism, which may for the moment produce illusory 
and ephemeral success at the cost of lasting achievement and 
progress. Above all, this national failing is due to the funda- 
mentally fallacious principles of our educational system with 
its mercenary and pandering appeal to the lower instincts 
^ Of. Aristodemocracy, Chaps, ii., iii. 



Efficiency 55 

and the ignorant cupidity of the vulgar mass of the people. 
And it is these same erroneous and misguiding principles 
which are invoked at this moment, when, in the painful 
recognition of our inefficiency, there arises a loud clamour to 
reform our national education by learning a lesson from our 
German enemies. When we demand that our educational 
training should take direct cognisance of the needs of our 
individual life and should directly prepare the young for the 
satisfaction of these needs, we fail to see that we begin at 
the wTong end and must entirely reverse our order of thought. 
We wish to bring science and our intellectual life down to the 
needs of our commercial and industrial life. The methods of 
German national education, which underlie all the com- 
mercial and the industrial, as well as the military, successes 
of that nation, consisted in the systematic endeavour to 
raise the economic and the industrial life of the people up- 
wards into direct and efficient touch with the highest and 
purest practices and achievements of science. To do this, 
the people as a whole and the national consciousness had to 
be made acquainted with, or at least, to be put into intel- 
lectual sympathy with, the highest and purest thought, and 
to learn to understand, to honour and to love it. Theory and 
research, as pursued by the chief votaries of Science, and 
practised in their universities, were brought in touch with 
the mass of the population. Instead of hatred of thought and 
of theory as a national — in fact as a social — characteristic of 
the people at large, there grew up respect for knowledge, the 
consciousness, moreover, that these remote spheres of mental 
activity and of intellectual achievement were friendly powers 
which could be appealed to, and could be used, even for the 
humblest form of daily activities in trade, industry and 
commerce. The result has been the facile, ready and all- 



56 Efficiency 

pen^ading application of science to industry, and, above all, 
the spirit of thoroughness in the teaching of every subject, 
from the highest academic teaching, through the technical 
and secondary schools, to the elementary schools^. Still 
more important in its all-pervading, though not so apparent, 
results has been the realisation of the true nature, as well as 
the material value, of the highest ideals of scientific Truth. 
No knowledge is firmly founded and thoroughly acquired 
unless it can be reduced to first principles. Therefore no 
workman can undertake a definite task unless he has 
thoroughly mastered the elements of the material upon 
which he is working and the methods of the work itself. 
This forms the distinction between the amateur and the 
professional worker. 

But we have said above that the business of 
Importance hfe includes our dealing in business with our 
Humanities. fellow-men. The goods which are produced or 

transported from the producer to the con- 
sumer, the markets which create the demand or may be 
opened up by the judicious efforts of the producer and the 
merchant, are made for human beings and for human society, 
as they are produced and transported by human beings. 
The needs of these human beings must therefore be con- 
sidered in the production of such goods, and the nature of 
these human beings must be considered in the distribution. 
We do not go far wrong if we maintain that one half of the 
important industrial and commercial functions, both in the 

* For a previous discussion of this question see my article on "The 
Ideal of a University" (North American Review, September, 1903)- 
also The Study of Art in Universities, Harper & Bros, 1896, pp. 51-70; 
see also two Notes (C and D) from that book, as well as an article on 
"Educational Reform" from the Journal of Education, June, 1916, 
here reprinted in the Appendix. 



Efficiency §7 

production and the distribution of goods, is concerned with 
the just and adequate understanding of human nature and 
human Hfe and our power of deaHng with these. I am not 
merely considering that vast class in the production of 
human commodities, in which the element of human taste 
and preference is the chief motive to production, or affects 
to a greater or a lesser degree the objects which are produced, 
but I am considering merely the relation which the produc- 
tion of goods holds to the understanding of human nature 
and human life, and, especially, to the importance which the 
correct estimate of human nature has in the distribution of 
goods and in our business dealing with other human beings. 
Thus, even in our business life, in industry and in commerce, 
the knowledge of man is of supreme importance. This know- 
ledge of man is directly furthered by all those studies which 
we call the Humanities, and the study of man, his thoughts 
and language, his private, social and political life in the past 
and present. It need hardly be insisted upon, that, in the 
preparation of the efficient worker in any and in every sphere 
of hfe, this element is of supreme importance; nor need I 
justify my contention that in the production of all those 
articles which are meant wholly or in part to satisfy human 
taste, the acquisition of taste, manifested in its purest and 
most potent form in the art and literature of the world is, if 
not absolutely essential, at all events, emphatically useful. 
But finally it must be conceded — and this will receive fuller 
treatment in the next chapter — that the power of formu- 
lating our ideas clearly and expressing them in logical and in- 
telligible speech, is not only of considerable importance in 
our business dealings, but is also directly conducive to clear- 
ness of thought, as well as to the methods and the thorough 
apprehension of Truth. The educational value of the study 



58 Efficiency 

of language as the chief vehicle in the expression of human 
thought is undeniable. We may go further and say, that in 
using language, the less we consider it merely as a means for 
the expression of our desires (the desires and not the expres- 
sion being uppermost in our consciousness) the greater is the 
educational and disciplinary value of the study of language in 
forming the habits of mind which make for thoroughness, 
accuracy and the higher appreciation of Truth. Therefore 
the study of foreign languages and the accurate and search- 
ing effort to understand the thoughts of others and ade- 
quately to convey them, in another vehicle, is most important 
as a discipUne, apart from the immediate uses and social 
advantages which the knowledge of foreign tongues may 
bring. On the same grounds, however,, the study of so-called 
dead languages, unadulterated by the intrusion of desires 
and use, becomes especially important and effective. The 
perfect organisation of classical studies, developed through 
ages by the efforts of foremost scholars, furnishes us with 
an instrument of education which it is unlikely that we 
can replace by any substitute. Quite apart from the in- 
estimable advantage to the spread and advancement of 
culture, intellectual refinement and taste which they bring, 
the mental effort of accurately rendering the meaning of a 
Greek or Latin author into intelligible English, and even of 
converting our thoughts into the remote, though ever-living, 
perfect and refined instrument of ancient Greek and Latin, 
is a training in precision and concentration of thought and 
its expression, tending towards the ultimate refinement of 
our sense of Truth, which it would be a decided loss for 
civilised humanity to forgQ. 



CHAPTER VII. 

JUSTICE AND CHARITY 

In the previous chapter we have been deahng with man's 
relation to Truth in the business of hfe and, further, with 
his attitude towards other human beings from this point of 
view, in order that his mental training should lead to 
efficiency. But there is another side to his relationship to 
his fellow-men, in addition to his business relation, in fact, 
in its spirit and nature exclusive of this " interested " attitude 
of mind — i.e. his social relationship to them. However im- 
portant the serious business side of Hfe may be, it is not an 
exaggeration to say that half man's efforts, half his con- 
scious and subconscious desires, are purely concerned with 
his social relationship to his fellow-men, and that, ultimately, 
even as a result of his efforts in the business of hfe, these 
latter are measured by their bearings upon his social re- 
lation, upon the approval or esteem in which others hold 
him and on the position which he can command in the 
society of which he is a member. The truth of this statement 
is supported by Aristotle's definition of man as a "social 
animal," as his essential and distinctive attribute, differen- 
tiating him from the animal world. At all events, this 
aspect of his conscious activity may claim equal importance 
with that which leads to efficiency. As a matter of fact, much 
of even this efficiency will depend upon the perfect develop- 
ment of his social quaUties. While the bulk of ethics, which 
are the guide to his moral conduct, is thus concerned with 
the social relation between men, with man in action, with the 

W.T. A 



6o Justice and Charity 

regulation of these acts so as to produce an ideal state of 
human society, and is thus eminently practical (so that 
Kant designated his ethical inquiries by the title Critique 
of Practical Reason in contradistinction to his Critique 
of Pure Reason), it is even here — ^perhaps above all here — 
that the correct conception, appreciation and apphcation of 
Truth is of supreme effect and importance. For, without the 
faculties that make for and command Truth, our charitable 
impulses, pur social instincts and training, may fail us, as 
they undoubtedly often do, in our dealings with our fellow- 
men, especially when our selfish passions, and above all the 
most active and destructive of our social vices, jealousy and 
envy, dominate us. 

Our judgment of other people, and the re- 
Matterof lation which we ought to hold to them and 

Understand- they to us, are entirely warped by these 
tng. 

passions. It is only by the help of our reason, 

of our intellectual grasp of Truth, that these errors and 

crimes can be rectified, as it is only by the formation of the 

habit of mind which enables us at all times to appeal to, and 

to apply, our apprehension of Truth, that justice in our 

deahng with our fellow-men is ensured and that true and 

effective charity can be exercised. Such justice is ultimately 

not a matter of feehng, but of understanding. 

To begin with the proper estimate of other 
Social Pre- people, it requires, above all things, the 
Convention. elimination of prejudice. The wildest and 

most common form of social prejudice is in 
the ignorant or thoughtless acceptance of adventitious 
attributes, assigning social qualities or faults, virtues or 
vices, privileges or penalties, which may have had some 
remote justification for groups of individuals under con- 



Justice and Charity 6i 

ditions of life long since past, but which in no way apply to 
the individuals of whose moral or social quaUties we are 
now to judge. This leads to that form of social prejudice 
which has been stigmatised as "snobbishness." We begin 
with the establishment of false values and we proceed to the 
misapplication of even these values to those with whom we 
have to deal. Even when the general marks of value on the 
broadest, rough and ready and inaccurate fixing of them by 
outer material conditions or by the hasty judgment of pubhc 
bodies, have set their guinea-stamp upon the gold, and in so 
far (when opportunities are not afforded to recognise it as 
gold or to test its true value) may be accepted and may be 
of use — there is no need for this guinea-stamp when oppor- 
tunity and even duty force us to test the true gold value. 
But in the ordinary thoughtless course of life, with those 
whose sense of Truth has not been developed and is not 
effectively present in their moral, the adventitious guinea- 
stamp overrules their acknowledgment of the inferior metal, 
which it untruthfully raises in value, while the piue gold 
which they have tested carries no value to them when it is not 
marked by the vulgar misleading stamp. The whole balance 
of justice in the social estimates of ordinary life is thus 
upset, and prejudice and injustice divert the flow of social 
existence into tortuous channels, polluting the clearness of 
its stream. 

If such are the vices and deficiencies of our 
ment and Jus- social attitude when not directed by Truth in 
tice leading their general form and widest grouping, in- 
justice and unkindness in our particular deal- 
ings with individuals are still more frequently the result of 
thoughtlessness and the absence of truthfulness in our judg- 
ment of our feUow-men. Intellectual altruism, the exercise of 



62 Justice and Charity 

our altruistic imagination, is the safest guide to social 
justice. The "golden rule" has long since impressed the 
truth of this fact. To see in their true light the claims of 
others and our own in due proportion to one another, is the 
essence of all justice in our dealings. But the effectiveness 
and reahsation of justice depend upon our understanding, 
upon our training in apprehending Truth and upon our 
adherence to its highest and purest standards. To attain 
to these, as we have seen, depends upon the elimination of 
our own prejudices and desires which block the way to 
perfect understanding. More positively it implies the power 
of self-detachment, of stepping outside ourselves, which our 
theoretical and imaginative faculties enable us to do. As 
this mental habit helps us to check our selfish impulses 
which lead us to harm others, so it also induces us to forgive 
the harm that may be done to us. Tout comprendre c'est tout 
pardonner remains one of the truest of commonplaces. Thus, 
through this same faculty of self-detachment, Justice meets, 
and is merged in, Charity, and confirms and strengthens the 
impulse of love which is as elementary and powerful in man 
as is that of hate and envy. 

Love and hate are the two ruling passions in man and may 
be of equal strength. No doubt, however, some are born 
with a preponderance of hate in their natures, while some 
are originally of a more loving disposition, others, again, are 
strong and passionate in their feelings or feeble and cold in 
temperament. There are no doubt those who are endowed 
from birth with affectionate dispositions, loving natures. 
Kindness and generosity may thus dwell in the breast of an 
illiterate clown to a greater degree and more effectively than 
in that of a cultured peer. But there comes a phase in the 
more complex conduct of social life when thoughtfulness and 



Justice and Charity 63 

the power of apprehending Truth are essential to justice and 
even to charity in action, and when without them our native 
disposition is not enough to guide us : the ignorant and un- 
trained are then helplessly carried away by instinct and 
passion. The strength of love over hate is Truth which pro- 
duces justice and charity. Therefore in the struggle between 
love and hate love must prevail in the end. To put it into 
a quasi-mathematical equation: If love originally equals 
hate as a passion, love has in addition reason, thought and 
truth, which produce justice, to strengthen it and give it 
endurance and lasting power. Love + Truth = Justice and 
Charity; Hate — Truth = Injustice and Envy. Love en- 
dures ; but it must be founded on Truth. Without the power 
of apprehending Truth, neither Justice nor Love endures. 

Thus in our deaHngs with our feUow-men the 
%tZn.'^'^ development of our sense of truth is most 

effective, though perhaps in a more indirect 
and remote process of application. We come, however, much 
nearer to its more direct effect when our judgments of our 
feUow-men are expressed by us in words and are communi- 
cated to others whose estimate is thus directly influenced 
by such transmitted judgment. As has been pointed out in 
the opening chapters, it is here that often the lowest stan- 
dards of morahty obtain among those who in all other re- 
spects manifest higher morality in their convictions and in 
their conduct. This is, I maintain, due to the fact that their 
estimate of truth is not adequate, and that the search for 
truth and its appUcation to Ufe have not, by a refined and 
continuous training, been made habitual in their mentality 
as a whole. It leads, as I have indicated in the Introduction, 
to degradation and to misery, to the disturbance and the 
lowering of the peaceful flow of social life, and is more wide- 
spread and intense than is realised by the greater number of 



64 Justice and Charity 

people. It covers all that may be summarised under the 
term slander. Now, we may at once exclude wilful calumny, 
the attempt, with deliberate forethought, to harm another 
by misrepresentation of facts. But outside the mephitic 
domain of actual calumny there is a vast region of untruthful 
statements to the detriment of our fellow-men with danger- 
ous hillocks and vague and doubtful plains and morasses of 
untruth, which people traverse heedlessly, not reahsing the 
traces which their footprints leave and the evil effects upon 
their own health which such a journey entails. The motives 
to such evil action vary from more or less conscious jealousy 
and hatred to thoughtlessness, from the craving for witty 
and humorous conversation and the amusement it gives, to 
mere talkativeness ; but the harm which is done remains and 
is often out of all proportion to the Hghtness of the impulse 
which gave it birth. 

In its worst form, approaching more or less closely to 
direct calumny, the first impulse to slander — or to use the 
more appropriate French word "medisance" — is given by 
jealousy or envy. But it differs from calumny in that the 
evil motive is not fully conscious as the untruthfulness is 
not deliberately present to the mind. But from the most 
violent forms of these evil passions, there is a gradual shading 
off to their almost imperceptible and unconscious presence 
in the lighter form — not devoid of some mitigating humour 
— which prevents us from denying to ourselves some slight 
pleasure in the discomfiture of our best friends — ^provided 
always they are successful in life. So active and widespread 
is this motive in human nature, that I have occasionally 
tried the experiment of predicting how long it would take, — 
in the case of very prominent and successful men and women 
who were made the idols of an appreciative and grateful 
pubhc while they were achieving, or just after they had 



Justice and Charity 65 

achieved, success, — to discover a reactionary wave of criti- 
cism and detraction, culminating often in grave charges and 
in most ludicrous untruths. I should not like to illustrate 
in corpora vili the vice of over-generalisation, to which I 
have referred above, by an overstatement which I make 
myself. But I am tempted to say that in almost every case 
my prediction proved true. To point it with two striking 
examples: Immediately following on their public successes 
in certain stages of their careers I discovered a wave of un- 
friendly criticism in various layers of society directed against 
both Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchei;ier. No doubt the 
effect of such medisance was limited in extent and temporary; 
but the interesting and significant feature of the phenomenon 
was that it followed immediately upon their successful 
achievements and universal commendation. 

In the lighter forms, however, of mere tittle-tattle, 
thoughtlessly originated and thoughtlessly repeated and dif- 
fused, slandar is so common in every layer of society that 
its effects are not only most disturbing to the peace and 
prosperity of social life, but act in a degrading and coarsen- 
ing manner upon the social tone in lowering the prevaiHng 
standards of Truth, and demoralising and disintegrating to 
the sense of veracity in the slanderers themselves. This sin 
is in the first instance due to the want of altruistic imagina- 
tion. If the originators or colporteurs of slander were for a 
moment to apply the Golden Rule, and attempt to reahse 
how it would feel if such things were to be said about them- 
selves, if their own trustworthiness and honour as men and 
women were assailed, if the result were to ruin or impair . 
their social position, the serious business of life, if it entailed 
the loss of personal friends and acquaintances, — it might 
fairly be doubted whether most of the people who lightly 
make or repeat damaging statements would do so. Yet if we 



66 Justice and Charity 

look about us, we find that in every social centre in the 
country, from the smallest village to the great metropolis, 
from the circles in which move the highest of the land down 
to the life "below stairs," the constant and frivolous asser- 
tions of untruths or, at least, of gross inaccuracies, are 
lightly made and are received with greedy readiness, and 
that they frequently result in untold misery and in the un- 
happiness of innocent people and often in the destruction of 
their usefulness in life. Though most of us will at once 
realise that it is wrong to invent lies about our neighbours and 
to communicate them to others, there are few who consider 
their grave responsibilities in repeating and in spreading 
them^, and still fewer again who are alive to the fact that 
it is their duty (however much they may shrink from dis- 
turbing the grace of social intercourse by tactless and 
awkward denials) to dispel or to modify a statement which 
they have reason to know is untrue, or even to challenge a 
damaging statement of which a doubt may exist in their 
minds. But the fact remains that it is perfectly possible, 
without sinning against good manners or impairing the 
general social tone for which we are all responsible, thus to 
protest, to correct or to express our doubt. 

There is here a vast sphere of "sins of omission," sins in 
which we become "accessories to the crime." We will sit by 
with folded hands and hear the most damaging statements 
made about people and even about our tested friends, feel 
the injustice, or, at least, have our doubts as to whether an 
injustice is not being committed, and not lift a finger to 

^ Cicero {De Rep. iv. lo) refers to the punisliment of the author of 
a carmen famosum, including even him who distributed it. The 
actio famosa included those who helped the author. In the Theodosian 
Code and by an edict of Valentinian and Valens capital punishment 
was even meted out to him, who having found a libel, communicated 
it instead of destroying it. 



Justice and Charity 67 

protect those who, where truth is concerned, are always in 
need of such protection. The phrase "Mind your own busi- 
ness," or " it's none of my business " is accountable for much 
that is vile and cowardly. It is as wrong to sit silent and, by 
one's silence, to confirm the spread of an untruth, as it is 
selfish and morally irresponsible to meet the undoubted 
proofs of the unworthiness and indignity of a dishonourable 
man unfit for decent society, by a shrug of the shoulder and 
the words "he has always been quite pleasant to me." 
There are many Dreyfus cases constantly developing in our 
midst the tragic issues of which on a smaller scale would 
never have come to fruition if we who knew the truth or 
could help it to prevail did not give tacit assent by our 
inaction; as the social success of many a dishonourable 
impostor, or even criminal, would never be possible if we 
did not put the seal of our approval upon him by suppressing 
our protest or even by admitting him into our society. Were 
our children to be taught at school and at home, and were 
such teaching to be continued by scrupulous practice in 
after life, that it is as dishonest and dishonourable to make 
damaging statements about our neighbours, as it is to de- 
ceive and to cheat or to steal; and were this to be instilled by 
every means into the daily life of all classes, much harm and 
misery would be avoided — ^while the sense of Truth within 
the nation would be kept purer, higher and more effective. 
It is, after all, here that the evil lies ; in the lowness of our 
conception, and the bluntness of our sense, of Truth. Most 
people are not taught and trained to realise that they have no 
right to make any statement as a fact which they have not 
tested as being true. This, again, depends upon our intellectual 
standards in relation to words and language, as much as 
active morafity depends upon our moral standard in our deeds. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

TRUSTWORTHINESS! 

The T thf I ^^^' effectiveness of our conception and prac- 

and the Un- tice of Truthfulness in social life, as regards 

ju . ^^j, attitude towards others, depends, after all, 

^ I am not here dealing with questions of moral casuistry con- 
cerning Truth — cases in which we are justified in telUng an untruth. 
I may as well quote a passage from Aristodemocracy (pp. 258-9; see 
also Patriotism, National and International, the chapter on "The 
Ascending Scale of Corporate Duties," pp. loi seq.): "The way to 
deal "with such moral casuistics is the purely positive, and not the 
negative method. By that I mean that one valid moral injunction is 
not eliminated by the fact of its clashing with another. Each one 
remains valid ; though at times reason and the application of a general 
sense of justice and proportion may have to decide whether the one 
injunction is not stronger than the other. ' Thou shalt not He ' retains 
its validity, even though 'Thou shalt not endanger the life and the 
permanent happiness of another' may lead the physician or the 
friend for the nonce to tell an untruth to an insane person or an 
invalid when the truth would undermine life or life's efficiency. A 
practical moral test can always be transmitted to the pupil, in 
bringing him conscientiously to ask himself whether, imagining that 
when the cause which led him to tell such an untruth or to commit 
an infraction of an ethical law is removed, he would be prepared to 
lay before the person to whom he told the untruth or to independent 
and disinterested people whom he respects, the course of action which 
he had pursued." 

By means of the just application of the principles of " The Ascend- 
ing Scale of Duties" all the problems implied in cases in which we 
are justified, and even bound, to tell an untruth are thus solved with- 
out impairing the vahdity of our duty to tell the truth. The cases in 
which an unjustified question is put, when we have clearly mani- 
fested our intention and our right to withhold information, the 
guarding of the author's pseudonym in the case of the Waverley 
Novels and similar well-known instances, as well as conventional 
phrases, such as " Dear Sir," "Yours sincerely," "Not at home," etc., 
in no way affect the validity of the moral law which enjoins the duty 
to speak the truth. 



Trustworthiness 69 

upon the degree in which Truth rules within us, and our 
character shows itself to the outer world in our adherence 
to its dictates. The man of honour, the wholly trustworthy 
person, is he whose "word is as good as his bond." The 
man who never knowingly tells an untruth, who even does 
not profess to know what he does not know and does not 
overstate what he does know, is trustworthy, is the man of 
strictest honesty. The honest man is he who, in words as 
well as in deeds, is clearly himself and does not wish to 
appear to be what he is not, to possess what he does not own, 
and to know what he does not know — this is the truly trust- 
worthy man. 

Yet how few are there who, though they may never de- 
liberately or consciously tell a falsehood, are accurate in 
their statements of facts, careful to qualify these statements 
so as never to mislead by exaggeration, and ever ready to 
admit their ignorance? The difference between men of such 
high standards and their less perfect fellow-men is not only 
that existing between the literate and illiterate, the educated 
and untrained minds, the thoughtful and the thoughtless, 
but between the truthful and the untruthful. 

Now we must at once guard against over- 
0/ Truthful stating our case as we must admit that, if these 

Conscientious- moral injunctions with regard to truth were to 
ness. . ,,. , . 

lead to constant or mopportune self-searchmg 

and to excess of caution and hesitancy, resulting from the 

desire to weigh each statement in the balance of accurate 

thought, it would deprive us of all spontaneity in expression 

and in conversation, and make of us either tiresome pedants 

or inarticulate stammerers in thought and in speech, while 

it would banish from conversation all wit and humour and 

even all grace, and thus impoverish or weigh down the free 



70 Trustworthiness 

growth and flowering of social life. We may thus err on the 
other side and become cumbrous pedants or even self-de- 
ceiving Pharisees, who himibly, though assertively, qualify 
all their statements about the outer world and about them- 
selves, generally obtruding their own personality where its 
presence is in no way called for. *' Unworthy as I am" 
(when he is not, or certainly ought not to be), ** though I 
know nothing about this subject" (when he does know, or 
ought to know), ''you all know more than I do" (which he 
certainly does not believe, or if he does believe it, it ought 
to reduce him to silence) — all such phrases are not only un- 
necessary, but are generally in themselves insincere, and 
certainly do not add to the spontaneous and graceful flow of 
human intercourse, nor even do they favour fulness in con- 
versation. The constant quaUfication of every ordinary 
statement, the cowardly avoidance of taking the responsi- 
bihty for a definite pronouncement, the checking or flatten- 
ing of all uprisings into the playful ripplings or graceful 
soarings of the flow and flights of wit and humour, would 
indeed reduce all statement to a fluid or gelatinous condition 
eluding all endeavours to hold and to retain what is stated. 
Social intercourse would certainly become either unbearable 
or be robbed of all its vitaHty and grace. 

The same appHes to literature, to the written word and to 
style. If the effort to conform to the higher dictates of 
veracity leads to platitudinarianism ; to the iteration of 
truisms; to the weighing down of every statement by in- 
volved qualifications, parentheses and discursive limitations; 
to the overloading of sentences with redundant adjectives and 
qualifying adverbs (of which, I fear, I am myself here and 
elsewhere giving abundant illustration) — the style and the 
substance conveyed by it will lose their power and purpose, 



Trustworthiness 71 

and we long even for the faults of coarse exaggeration, for 
overstatement and paradox which are the besetting sins of 
modern Hterature. 

Nevertheless, the assertive and dogmatising 
Dosmatisf^^ man, the thimiping, domineering over-stater, 

the omniscient person, the man who never 
admits his ignorance, are not only glaringly untrustworthy 
in diction and in character, but are ungainly and intellectually 
repulsive, as they spoil and even make quite impossible 
agreeable social intercourse^. This also applies to a whole 
group of intellectuals whose conversation is chiefly directed 
by their endeavour to escape from any subject of which they 
do not feel themselves complete masters, and to push or drag 
or inveigle it into spheres and on matters where they can 
do all the crowing and where they feel themselves the '' cocks 
of the walk." More innocent, though equally tedious if not 
repulsive, is the dealer in superlatives ; the man who knows 
everybody worth knowing and knows them intimately; 
whose friends are the greatest and best and most distin- 
guished ; whose every possession or purchase is the best ; and 
who emphasises his every statement with the most impres- 
sive adjuncts of asseveration or assurance. Whatever other 
qualities such people have they certainly do not include a 
refined sense of truthfulness, and they cannot command 
faith in their statements, however much we may trust their 
kindness of heart and their general good-nature. What, 
however, is more serious is their unconsciousness of the fact 
that, by deviating from the truth, they are habitually com- 
mitting a crime; and that, by our admission or toleration of 
such delinquencies and weaknesses we are lowering our 

^ See Appendix IV (article on "Modesty" in Harper's Weekly), 



72 Trustworthiness 

general standards of Truth, the maintenance of which on a 
supreme level is of the utmost importance. 

So also in hterature, the dominance of the 
Exaggeration paradox, the mentality from which it emanates 
in Literature. 3^ well as the mental ethos which it tends to 
produce in the public, constitute a grave 
menace to taste as well as to morality. Its origin is not due 
to any intrinsic, artistic or literary principle or force; but 
chiefly to the accident of the surface conditions of modern 
material hfe. Exaggeration to arrest attention, and even 
exaggeration as a legitimate element in humour, are the 
strong drink of unsensitive palates, the flaring colours and 
designs for eyes deadened in their visual perception by the 
vulgar glare of modern life and the coarseness of touch of the 
man whose whole life leads him to grope through the bustle 
of crowded streets and mass-meetings. Literature, as mono- 
polised by the newspaper and its style ^, becomes that of the 
advertising agent, whose signboards have as their sole object 
the arresting of attention. The result is, both in literature and 
in art, the era of striking and sight-arresting lines, contrasted 
masses unrelated and unharmonised, glaring colours, devoid 
of tone, with unadjusted values, and the absence of refine- 
ment and harmony in design and in line, in shadings and in 
half tones — in short want of refinement and accuracy. To 
a great extent, though perhaps not wholly so, this disease 
in taste, this practice of overstatement, this concentrated 
and inordinate desire to arrest attention, — all these are due 
to the fundamental habit of mind in which the sense of 
Truth is not developed, but has been even coarsened. 

If our habits of thought and expression, our whole men- 
tality, were to be transfused with the highest conception of 

* See Part II, below. 



Trustworthiness 73 

Truth which each age clearly formulates and brings within 
effective range of its thought and life in every phase of its 
activity, even the most remote from theory, the most 
practical, our tone of conversation and our taste in Hterature 
and art would be more adequately expressive of the truly 
best that is in us. 

To complete this outline exposition of our sub- 
ject a few remarks must be added on the re- 
lation of conversation to Truth. Conversation has been 

* One of my learned friends, at the same time a brilliant conver- 
sationalist, has laid it down that the first rule of conversation was 
not to be accurate. Like most mots of that kind, this one contains a 
grain of truth. The belief of many tediously prosy and pedantic 
conversationaUsts that they must convey in one long-winded breath 
and soUloquy the final truth on every subject they touch upon, im- 
pHes a finahty in their own diction which leads to dogmatism as it 
springs from pedantry and egotism. But the briUiant and ready 
epigrammatist and lover of the inaccurate is equally dogmatic and 
also puts an end to all conversation of a serious and entertaining 
nature. To recall instances from those who are no more, the late 
Henry Sidgwick was as witty a man, possessed of as catholic a sense of 
humour as were few people whom I have known. But he was always 
fair and sympathetic to his interlocutor or adversary in a discussion, 
never overstating his case and always bringing the conversation as 
a whole nearer the goal of Truth. This did not exclude the epigram, 
wit or satire with their exaggeration and inaccuracy. These are fully 
justified from a hterary and artistic point of view and can never be 
spared. They are to be considered, as it were, n quotation marks, or 
as in hterature and art the caricature, the satire, the fantastic and 
grotesque are justified. The conversation of the late Oscar Wilde and 
that of his followers and imitators abounded in epigrams, until these 
became the very heart and substance of conversation instead of its 
pleasing and diverting adjuncts. They are the hors d'ceuvres and 
entremets to the conversational meal. But a whole dinner consisting 
of nothing but such hors d'ceuvres and entremets is not only not sus- 
taining (as it is bad for the digestion), but becomes tediously irritating 
and not at all delectable to the palate — in fa^t a nauseating surfeit 
from which the hungry guests turn with the loss of all appetite. 



74 Trustworthiness 

defined by Plato and Aristotle as the means of arriving at 
the truth by the co-operation of two or more people, who 
enumerate facts and interchange views and opinions for this 
final purpose. It aims at the evolution of Truth by such dis- 
cussion (Arfst. /r. 54). Plato thus assigns the highest place 
among all sciences to conversation {SiaXeKTCKij) and con- 
siders it the coping-stone [dpiy/cof;) to all studies (Rep. 534 e). 
The chief object to be held in view, to which all others must 
be subordinated, is the discovery and the confirmation of 
Truth; and though, to arrive at it, each participant must 
express with adequate clearness his own experiences and 
opinions to carry understanding and conviction and also to 
point out error in the statement or argument of the other 
participants, in so far as it is not a monologue, but a dia- 
logue, this is not the final aim: the real object is discovery 
of Truth, to which the conversation as a whole must be 
scrupulously subordinated. In every phase of conversation 
the participant ought to be conscious of this final purpose 
and ought never to act like a special-pleading lawyer or a 
casuistic disputant, who cares naught for Truth, but is bent 
merely upon asserting and carrying his own point. Our 
ultimate aim must be to add our share to the final discovery 
of Truth-^to converse, not to cavil {ovk ipi^eiv aWa Bia- 
Xeyea-dac, Plato, Rep. 454 a). 

Yet how rare is it to find this conscious or subconscious 
aim dominating a conversation ! The desire to arrive at the 
truth is entirely lost sight of in the hurried eagerness of self- 
assertion and the consequent attempt to establish and to 
win recognition for hasty statements. Coupled with this, 
mark the eager, often meanly puerile, attempts at tripping 
up the adversary, the wilful misunderstanding, or even the 
perversion of his meaning; the merciless faUing upon his 



Trustworthiness 75 

weak points, the unfair use that is made of a sHp on his part 
or an awkwardness in his turn of expression, lending itself 
to cheap witticism, diverting the trend of thoughts from the 
main issue and disconcerting the blunderer in exposition, 
who may be sincerely bent upon arriving at the truth ! How 
one loves the man who, in a discussion, turns to his adversary 
and remarks: "By the way, a very strong point in favour of 
your contention is," etc.; who admits the strength of what 
his opponent upholds, before expressing his doubts of its 
validity — in short, the generous rival ! I shall always hold 
in pious memory the days of my early youth, when (more 
than forty years ago) in the distinguished circle of intellectual 
luminaries at George Henry Lewes' house "The Priory" in 
London, George Ehot gave the most vital illustration of the 
quahties of the true conversationalist in support of my own 
weakness. I had come to England as a very young man from 
a continuous stay of over three years at several German 
universities, speaking and reading nothing but German and 
dwelling exclusively in an atmosphere of German thought, 
and had seriously impaired the spontaneity of expression in 
my native tongue. I shall never forget, how, when in this 
disconcerting position among my elders and intellectual 
superiors, I ventured haltingly and blunderingly to express 
my own opinions, she would then come to my rescue, and, 
with delicate tact, suffused with kindliness and with pene- 
trative intellectual sympathy, and with her mellow voice and 
mellifluous though precise diction, would give perfect, lucid 
form to my own involved thoughts — leaving me with in- 
creased self-confidence, almost proud of the pertinence and 
importance of my own remarks. How grateful I was to her, 
how I loved her — and how much she contributed, by her 
w.T. 5 



76 Trustworthiness 

unselfish intellectualism and passion for Truth, to the flow 
and elevation of the conversation itself ! 

How rare it is to find a good listener 1 I mean by this, one 
who dispels from his mind for a moment the urgent and 
absorbing appeal of his own thoughts and his impulses of 
self-expression, in order truly and fully to understand the 
meaning and the drift of thought of his interlocutor. Before 
the speaker has fairly begun most people are already en- 
tirely occupied with what they intend to answer. Watch 
their faces, examine their eyes, and you will meet with no 
sign of attention, no effort to grasp what is being said to 
them. Most people we meet have preoccupied eyes. It is 
above all in children that we meet with that pure, direct 
look which goes out from them to the person or the thing 
the\^ are endeavouring to understand, entirely absorbed in 
the object which their senses and their growing intellect are 
trying to grasp in its true essence. One does meet this fresh- 
ness and directness of the look in the eye of some admirable 
people with pure or loving, or great and strong souls; but 
above all, in wise men, however old they may be, who have 
retained the heart and the enthusiasm of the child. But we 
can all produce in ourselves this cardinal virtue, as it mani- 
fests itself in the highest of human organs, by, on the one 
hand, persistently checking and driving back the impulses to 
self-absorption and, on the other hand, by an effort of will 
(which, if continuously exercised, may ultimately produce 
habit), by forcing our attention wholly to follow and to 
grasp what is being communicated to us by others — above all, 
by cultivating and strengthening our passion for Truth. 

As in conversation, so there is an application 
Reading. 

of the same principle and motive-power to our 

reading, of which modern men and women have made com- 



Trustworthiness 77 

paratively so great a practice; for the average adult, and 
even youth, of every class in our days reads infinitely more 
than did his forefathers. Most of these assiduous readers, 
especially women, read for mere diversion; and this diversion 
consists in satisfying, without effort, their hunger for the 
coarser forms of wond-er, of the unexpected, of what is purely 
imaginative, sensational or humorous, or (when they venture 
into the domain of thought) to find — again without effort — 
their own thoughts reflected or confirmed by others. How 
few of them are urged on to read continuously and with con- 
centration in order that they may learn: that they may 
increase the very narrow horizon of their experiences and 
thoughts, that they may sharpen and refine their instru- 
ments of reason and their appreciation of Truth. Their 
horror of what they call obscurity in a writer is in no way 
limited to the justified instances where the author himself 
has, from incompetence or from indolence, failed to give 
clearness to the expression of his own thoughts; but em- 
phatically extends to all writings where the subject-matter 
itself, in its depths or in its elevation, requires, not only in 
the adequate expression of it, but in the understanding of 
its meaning and purport, an effort of concentration and 
penetration which excludes all preoccupation, as it demands 
serious and disciphned mental exertion. Men, on the other 
hand, who from their school-days upwards have had the 
advantage of higher education, have learnt the practice of 
concentrated reading for their definite studies. Happily, 
within the last generation or two, women are being trained 
on the sarhe fines ; but the habit and the faculty are rarely 
kept up and improved in after life. Would it not be possible 
for women with any intellectual aspirations or claims to 
culture, who are possessed of leisure, to devote one hour, or 

5—2 



78 Trustworthiness 

even half-an-hour, a day habitually to read some serious 
book with the same concentration, in the same spirit, as 
marked their earlier studies? The boy and the man who 
have known the deUght of fretting and puzzling over an 
obscure passage in Greek or in some modern philosophical 
author, resulting in the final victory in which they have been 
able to render the true meaning in their own language, and 
fulfilled the serious task which their life-work in those days 
imposed upon them, will have given birth in their own soul 
to a passion, which among all human passions is least likely 
to injure their neighbours or to degrade their own loftiness 
of soul — the passion for Truth. 

But what is the meaning of all these various manifestations 
in our inner life, in our business and in our social life, which 
lead to honesty, to efficiency, to justice and charity, to trust- 
worthiness and honour and to our faculty of furthering the 
amenities of social intercourse? They are all focussed on the 
one great achievement of the human mind, our ruling passion 
for Truth, underlying and guiding all work, all intercourse, 
all conversation, the highest form of moral and intellectual 
unselfishness and of beneficent altruism. 



PART II. 
PUBLIC VERACITY 

CHAPTER I. 
GENERAL IMPORTANCE OF PUBLIC VERACITY 

What has been said of Truth in the Hfe of the individual 
appUes also — ^perhaps even more potently — to public 
veracity. Truth is the greatest material asset of individual 
and pubhc Hfe. Trust and confidence are the foundation of 
all fair business deaHng as they are of social intercourse. 
Like the protection of life and property they must be 
guarded by law and custom. Children must be taught, and 
adults must be confirmed in their conviction, that lying is as 
pernicious and far-reaching a crime as theft and murder. 
The State must directly and positively guard Truth as much 
as life and property. 

Morahty thus appHes to public as much as it does to 
private life. In the classical pronouncement of President 
Wilson he maintains "that we are at the beginning of an age 
in which it will be insisted that the same standards of con- 
duct and responsibihty for wrong done shall be observed 
among nations and their governments that are observed 
among individual citizens of civiHsed States." 

We may go further and say that it ought to be and is in 
the very nature of things more possible for the laws of 
morality to prevail within the larger corporate bodies and 
among States than among individuals. The larger public 
bodies and States are not more, but less, likely to be tempted 



8o General Importance of Public Veracity 

to sin against Truth and Justice; and their morahty ought 
to be higher not lower than individual morality. For, in the 
first place, corporate bodies are directly governed by laws, 
whereas individuals, though ultimately subject to and con- 
trolled by such laws, legally and morally, are directly moved 
to action by impulse, instinct and desire, interest or will. In 
the second place, the conditions of corporate action, especi- 
ally in modern democratic States, are such as to preclude the 
influence of momentary caprice, the accidents of individual 
temperament and the complexities of individual life. Fur- 
thermore, those who carry out and are responsible for the 
corporate action of the State are forced to realise that every 
act reflects upon public morality and public honour. If the 
individual has to maintain his own and even his family 
honour, the State is responsible for the national honour and 
includes that of all its citizens. Finally a simple truth must 
be recognised that, just as the religious life of the Church 
should be higher and purer than that of its single votaries, 
so must the morality of the State be higher than that of its 
individual citizens. 

Now it is essential to the normal life of a civilised and 
democratic community that the citizen should have full 
faith and confidence in the justice and veracity of the State. 
The citizen of a democratic country should, by the con- 
stitution of the State, by its traditions and government and 
by every individual public action, be confirmed in his con- 
viction of the fairness, trustworthiness and truthfulness of 
his political rulers. There can hardly be a greater shock to 
the moral sense of modern man living in a modern demo- 
cratic State than a case of miscarriage of justice. Though we 
know that such an event is possible, in fact, that such 
isolated accidents and exceptions in the administration of 



General Importance of Public Veracity 8i 

the law governing civilised communities have occurred and 
do occur, our faith in the constraining rule, in its necessary- 
logical sequence, in the rational causality, leads us to believe 
firmly in the supreme rule of justice; in fact, that though 
exceptional errors may occur, right will prevail in the end. 
Without this fundamental belief our conscious existence 
would not be what it is. Of equal basic importance to the 
very nature of our civilised consciousness is our faith in the 
truthfulness of the State, that the State as such cannot lie. 
The individual may be unjust, the State can never be. 
There may be corrupt officials ; but the State itself with its 
sovereignty must remain pure and truthful in our con- 
ception. 

In the autocratic governments of the past a marked 
dualism, and even antagonism, between the governors and 
the governed was justified in fact, as it was encouraged by 
the attitude of such governments towards their subjects. 
Authority, power, force were the ground upon which 
obedience was exacted, and therefore the mental attitude 
of the subjects was either that of unreasoning obedience or 
of divergence and antagonism of interests, of resentment and 
revolt — the attitude of the slave to his master. In a demo- 
cracy, government is established by consent, the governed 
delegate authority to the government, as they make their 
own laws. The government is a friend not an enemy of the 
people. It is therefore essential that the citizens should have 
faith in the justice, the absolute fairness and trustworthiness 
of the administrators of the law. Every act of the adminis- 
tration which destroys or weakens this faith dissolves the 
essence and spirit of democratic government. That a govern-- 
ment should lie, should be unfair or tricky in its deahngs, is 
a blow at the most vital organ of the body politic. 



82 General Importance of Public Veracity 

The government and the law-abiding citizens are thus 
co-operators in the furtherance of the objects of the State. 
It is only with the criminal and the law-breaker that the 
government is in conflict and is justified in using methods of 
warfare. 

If these truths are so fundamental and self-evident that 
they inevitably sound like platitudes, the practice, if not the 
theory as weU, of modern politics even in the most demo- 
cratic States, does not always confirm and support such 
principles and behefs. 



CHAPTER II. 
TRUTH IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS 

To begin with the international relationships of States to one 
another, our pubUc morality, more especially as regards 
veracity, is in direct contradiction with the ethical conscious- 
ness of modern man and the spirit of modern democracies. 
The traditions as well as the organisation of the Foreign 
Offices and the Diplomatic Services in the modern world, 
even in the most democratic States, with the Secret Service, 
the Mihtary and other Attaches (whose function is in many 
cases that of spies even in times of peace), are entirely at 
variance not only with our convictions, but with our pro- 
fessions. Even in modern democratic States, in many 
aspects of our activities, we still stand on the ground of 
Machiavelli's Principe. It was a diplomat who said that: 
"La parole a ete donnee a Vhomme pour cacher sa pensde." 
(Speech has been given to man to hide his thoughts.) We 
have all- — though perhaps in different degrees — sinned in 
this respect. It is not merely for the immediate consequences 
in European history that the falsification of the Ems tele- 
gram by Bismarck and his colleagues marks a tragic down- 
ward step in the evolution of modern poUtics; but for its 
effect upon the political consciousness of modem man. When 
it stands in all its nakedness and degrading cynicism before 
our moral judgment, every normal moral being must be 
stirred to the depths and urged to moral revolt against the 
promulgation of an untruth. 



84 Truth in International Relationships 

If we could become acquainted with the true facts in the 
organisation of the German Secret Service as directed by 
von Hoist ein in the days of Bismarck (the details of which 
even the great statesman could not control) casting its net 
for many years all over the world in times of peace, the 
fearful duplicity and demoralisation of which are more and 
more coming to light in these latter days, the moral sense 
of every right-thinking man and woman in every country 
would be revolted. Shall we ever know the whole truth 
concerning the German preparation for this war and its in- 
ception, the direct activity, not so much of the All-deufsche 
party as of the Kaiser himself, of Prince Biilow, his col- 
leagues and successors and the various Departments of 
State? Will the archives of the Foreign Office at Vienna 
and Berlin ever reveal all the secret documents which passed 
between them immediately before the war? We shudder at 
the cesspools of lying, at the duplicity and corruption which 
the Bolo affair and similar scandals that have come to hght, 
reveal. Shall we ever know all about the atrocities in Belgium 
and in Northern France, and who was directly responsible 
for these dastardly crimes? At a recent Socialistic gathering 
at Berne a German Socialist Deputy categorically denied 
the truths of fact with regard to these atrocities .and was 
evidently led to believe by the official communications in his 
own country that they had never occurred. 

Even after the war, humanity must not forget the exist- 
ence of such charges and must dispassionately establish the 
truth in order to right the balance of the world's morality. 
Professor Nippold has asserted in "Das Erwachen desDeut- 
schen Volkes und die Rolle der Schweiz" (Zurich, 19 17), that, 
had the truth been told to the German people, they would 
have awakened from the hypnotic sleep into which the 



Truth in Internatianal Relationships 85 

official lies had put them and the war would never have 
taken place or, had it been begun, would have ended as soon 
as the truth was known. 

Surely the free citizens of every country have not only 
the right, but the duty, to know and to discover the truth 
and to control the action of the State in what is most vital 
to their lives and their interests. 

When in medicine a disease has actually manifested itself 
in an acute form, it generally calls for what might be termed 
a "symptomatic " treatment; there is no time for an organic 
or constitutional treatment. The world is now suffering 
from the severest of all the acute diseases, and the cure must 
in so far be symptomatic, i.e. decisive victory over the 
militaristic and autocratic enemy. But when this acute 
crisis in the health of civilised humanity has yielded to this 
heroic treatment, the time will come when we must investi- 
gate the more fundamental "etiology," the organic causes 
which led to the disease. Such an organic cause is the sup- 
pression of truth and the diffusion of falsehood. 

When in the future — as we may all hope— a League of 
Nations, or, as I should prefer, an International Court 
backed by Power^, is established, it will be one of the chief 
functions of such an international body to suppress untruths 
and to ensure the widest publication of truth. The difficult 
task will, of course, be, when the truth is determined, to 
ensure that it shall effectually be published and transmitted 
even into the culpable country and among its people against 
the will of the government without destroying or contra- 
vening the sovereignty of the State. But there is a very 

^ See my own plan for such an International Court as first given in 
The Expansion of Western Ideals and the World's Peace, 1899, pp. 105 
seq, ; and Aristodemocracy, etc.. Chap. xi. 



86 Truth in International Relationships 

simple answer and expedient for such a doubt. For one of 
the inahenable rights of such an International Court will be 
that its decisions and findings and all the reports of its inter- 
national work shall be pubUshed regularly and distributed 
throughout every country belonging to the League, and even 
in the countries that have not given their adherence. Such 
publication will be a regular part of its oflScial functions. 
It will thus be far from one of the least important and 
effective functions of this body of the future to counteract 
the He and to diffuse and confirm the reign of truth. 

It is one of the many and most grave misfortunes of these 
latter days that the fight for universal rights admitted by all 
just and sane people is taken up by one section or one party 
in the several countries who may be in most other respects 
at variance with the rest of their feUow-citizens, and arouses 
artificial and irrational opposition where otherwise no such 
opposition could exist. The control of foreign affairs should 
never be made a party question; it is a fundamental right 
and duty of every citizen in a democratic country. We have 
done with the traditions of a lying diplomacy. 



CHAPTER III. 

TRUTH IN DOMESTIC POLITICS 

The importance of Truth in international relations will be 
readily admitted. In domestic politics its effect and influence 
manifest themselves not so directly in the promulgation or 
enforcement of definite national claims or interests and their 
transmission and publication, but in a more indirect and 
general, though none the less effective, way in the moral 
atmosphere produced by practice and tradition in the several 
departments of national administration. 

We have insisted above on the importance of faith and 
confidence of the governed in their government, and have 
maintained that any actions, traditions or customs in 
governments which weaken or destroy this faith, are in- 
jurious to the essence of domestic government and de- 
moralising to the national life of the people. 

While considering the duties of man to the State^, we must 
equally insist upon the moral duties of the State to its 
citizens. One of the primary duties of the State in this 
respect is that none of its institutions, traditions or actions 
should directly contravene the sense of justice, fairness and 
veracity. It need not be insisted upon that this apphes 
above all to the administration of justice. But of less direct, 
though of equal importance, the several business depart- 
ments in the administration of government must scrupulously 
and manifestly stand before the public in not only avoiding 

1 See Aristodemocracy, etc., Part IV. Chap. iii. 



88 Truth in Domestic Politics 

all practices which would not be considered just and fair in 
the private deaUngs of honourable people; but they must 
positively and directly display the desire for fair, friendly 
and generous treatment of the citizens with whom they deal. 
Any procedure or custom or tradition in the working of such 
a department which implies unfair dealing, or is even re- 
motely based on the assumption of an antagonistic or 
inimical attitude of the government towards the governed, 
is destructive of such faith and strikes the keynote of de- 
ception and untruthfulness in their dealings. 

Now, rightly or wrongly, for instance, the opinion is wide- 
spread that the Treasury and the Inland Revenue Offices 
work upon the assumption that they must get the highest 
possible contribution out of the taxpayer, and that the tax- 
payer will avail himself of every chance to avoid the obliga- 
tions which the law of the country places upon him. Apart 
from their legitimate duty to foil the attempts (which are 
moreover criminal) of the citizen who, by the suppression of 
truth or by actual deception, endeavours to evade the pay- 
ment of his obligatory taxes, they are keenly and persistently 
bent upon detecting and pointing out any mistake he may 
have made to the detriment of the fiscus. On the other hand, 
no tradition seems to exist (or if it does the public is not 
made aware of it) voluntarily to detect and to make known 
any mistake that has been made to the illegitimate advan- 
tage of the Treasury and to the detriment of the taxed 
citizen. Moreover the procedure in rectifying such a mistake 
is so cumbersome and onerous that the citizen is often dis- 
couraged from attempting to enforce his just claims. 

In the same way there is a beUef current among the public 
that it is of no use to fight any Government Department for 
the redress of an injustice, for — rightly or wrongly — it is be- 



Truth in Domestic Politics 89 

lieved that, with the powerful legal machinery at its com- 
mand, it can enforce its claims through every successive 
Court of Law, which procedure entails such expenditure that 
the ordinary citizen shrinks from the labour and the expense 
implied, even though he be fully convinced of the justice and 
truthfulness of his claims and assertions. 

Now it must be admitted that the prevalence of such a 
belief affecting the attitude of the governed towards the 
government undermines the very spirit of democratic in- 
stitutions, as these rest upon justice and truthfulness. A 
more subtle sphere in administrative activity, demanding 
nicer moral distinctions, is presented by the practice of the 
Departments I have here selected in ascertaining the taxable 
obligations of citizens, namely, in using indirect and not 
open sources of information, even such as might come under 
the heading of spying. Now we must admit that in all 
criminal investigation and procedure, or even where there 
is ground ior prima facie suspicion, the emplo3mient of such 
means as come under the heading of detective work is ad- 
missible; but I maintain that when such primary grounds 
are not evident, and when the other party in the transaction 
is not clearly informed of a state of warfare, such action is 
distinctly reprehensible. It savours of underhandedness and 
untruthfulness and is essentially opposed to the leading 
national quality of the British people, namely, fair-play. 
Nay, even to use and thereby to encourage the activity of 
the unprofessional informer, before just grounds of criminal 
procedure or even of the suspicion of criminal practice have 
been established, savours of untruthfulness and dishonesty 
in dealing. By similar actions or traditions the government 
as such is sinning against its duty to Truth and, whatever 
material advantages may be gained, it is seriously under- 



90 Truth in Domestic Politics 

mining the moral health of the nation and destroying the 
spirit of democracy. 

The same applies to that group of public 
Pn^^ik^. activities which come under the law of hbel 

and confer certain immunities on what are 
called "privileged statements." 

In the light of the important subject with which we are 
here deaUng, the principles and practice of the law of libel 
and slander in England are defective. The practice of the 
Enghsh libel law is, dejure and de facto, a denial of our thesis 
that truth is an actual asset to civilised society. For in this 
law and its practice the contravention of truth only becomes 
a real factor when "material damage" directly results from 
it^. It is on this ground, and this ground only, that the law 
takes cognisance of it. While, no doubt, the importance of 
truth is admitted or imphed, it in no way becomes the cen- 
tral element of legal importance or practical procedure. In 
so far, truth, as such, is disregarded as a matter of supreme 
importance in national Hfe worthy of legislation to safe- 
guard and to advance it; just as the idea of Honour (though 
not wholly ignored) is not directly and prominently recog- 
nised as worthy of protection in such legislation. 

In this respect English law differs in practice essentially 
from French law. French law covering libel and slander^ 
summarises both these forms in the term diffamation. It 
distinguishes between diffamation and injure. "Every alle- 
gation or imputation of a fact which injures the honour of 
any person, or the consideration in which such person is 

1 The common sajdng, "the greater the truth the greater the 
libel" may contain an inaccurate epigrammatic exaggeration; but it 
illustrates the point we wish to emphasise. 

2 See Code d'Instntction Criminelle et Code PSnal, 191 3, pp. 600 seq. 



Truth in Domestic Politics 91 

held, or of the corporate body to whom the fact is imputed,, 
is a diffamation." (" Toute allegation ou imputation d'unfait 
qui porta atteinte d I'honneur ou a la consideration de la per- 
Sonne ou du corps auquel lefait est impute est unediffamation.") 
"Every insulting expression, term of contempt or invective 
which does not include the imputation of a definite fact, is 
an insult — injure." (" Toute expression outrageante, terme de 
mepris ou invective qui ne renferme Vimputation d'aucun 
fait est une injure.") 

There is thus an essential difference established in French 
law between the statement or implication of a definite action 
or fact on the one hand, which constitutes diffamation, and 
a general insult or invective which does not impute any 
definite fact or action, and constitutes une injure. In 
English law there is a definite distinction between slandey 
and libel, determined by the form of pubUcation. "A de- 
famatory statement is a statement concerning any person 
which exposes him to hatred, ridicule or contempt, or whicfe 
causes him to be shunned or avoided, or which has a tendency 
to injure him in his office, profession or trade. Such state- 
ment, if in writing, printing or other permanent form, is a 
libel; if in spoken words or significant gestures, a slander^." 

A libel is always a more ^erious offence "because the law 
assumes that in case of libel, i.e. where the defamatory state- 
ment is in writing, printing or 6ther permanent form, the 
person defamed has of necessity suffered damage, and is 
therefore entitled to maintain an action." On the other hand, 
in the case of slander, " . . .the plaintiff cannot succeed with- 
out proof of special damage, except in four cases. These four 
cases are: (i) where the words charged the plaintiff with 

^ See Sir Hugh Eraser's Principles and Practices of the Law of Libel 
and Slander, s^h Edition, 1917, p. l. 

w.T. 6 



92 Truth in Domestic Politics 

having committed a criminal offence which is punishable 
corporally ; or (2) where they impute that he has a contagious 
disease of a particular kind; or (3) where they are spoken of 
him in relation to his office, profession or trade ; or (4) where 
they impute unchastity or adultery to any woman or girl " 
(Fraser, Ihid. pp. 32 seq.). *'Thus a man may be called a 
cheat, rogue, swindler or villain, he may be charged with 
being immoral or profligate, unless such accusation relates 
to his conduct in office, profession or trade, or is connected 
with the duties of his office or profession, no action will lie. 
In order to make good his claim he must prove definite 
temporal loss, as for instance, loss of a client or customer, or 
loss or refusal of some appointment or employment; of a 
gift, pecuniary or otherwise, even though it be only gratui- 
tous hospitality — at dinner. The loss of a marriage may also 
be adduced; but not the strained relations and the prob- 
ability of a divorce in matrimony; nor the loss of friends, 
nor the possibihty of actual damage, nor mental pain or 
distress, nor bodily illness, nor even expulsion from a re- 
ligious society. Even the future effect of such a slander, 
though producing no special damage (such as the loss of a 
directorate unless he can clear himself), will stand." 

Now, whereas the idea of honour forms the central element 
in the conception in French libel and slander and whereas an 
insult as such is a punishable offence, the Enghsh law does 
not consider or admit such a conception as in itself estabhsh- 
ing a tort or ground for a criminal action. The law only offers 
its protection where material damage can be proved. 

No doubt the truth or untruth of a statement is admitted 
as of importance and as affecting "justification." But it is 
a most characteristic and instructive point to consider the 
ground upon which truth thus estabhshes "justification." 



Truth in Domestic Politics 93 

It is not on the ground of the moral outrage caused by the 
untruth, or of the absolute necessity of upholding truth both 
in law and morahty, but because "the law will not permit a 
man to recover damages in respect of an injury to a character 
which he either does not or ought not to possess" (Fraser, 
Ihid. p. 145). 

It will therefore be seen that some form of material injury 
which can be translated into definite material loss or gain 
constitutes a tort or crime. In no way does the law here con- 
firm the importance of truth and honour and the criminality 
of offences against either. 

Thus the principles and practices of the EngHsh law of 
libel and slander are indirectly destructive of the estabhsh- 
ment and the safeguarding of truth in English life. 

In some ways still more fatal to the spirit of 
truth are the limitations governing the law of 
libel and slander under the heading of "privileged state- 
ments.' ' In certain cases, even though the matter complained 
of is defamatory, it is supposed to be in the interests of 
public pohcy that no liabiUty attaches to the pubHcation 
thereof. The occasion is privileged. These occasions are 
either of "absolute privilege" or of "qualified privilege." 
In the case of "absolute privilege" no action Hes, "however 
untrue and mahcious the statements may have been"; in 
the case of "quahfied privilege" a statement made upon an 
occasion of this kind is prima facie protected. But proof of 
actual maHce wiU, however, rebut the prima facie protection 
afforded by such an occasion. Moreover it is for the plaintiff 
(the U belled person) to prove that the defendant acted in 
bad faith, and not for the defendant to prove that he acted 
in good faith. It will readily be seen how difficult it is to 
estabhsh legal proof of "maHce." This privilege is granted 

6—2 



94 Truth in Domestic Politics 

to Members of Parliament speaking in Parliament, to 
judges and lawyers in their judicial functions, to Govern- 
ment officials, even to those of local governmental bodies, 
and to other corporate officials in their official capacity. 

Now it will readily be perceived how it would hamper the 
political representatives in their public work and in the 
public interest, judges and lawyers who endeavour to carry 
out the law — in fact, officials of all kinds in the performance 
of their public or official duties — if they were constantly 
hampered or threatened by legal proceedings instituted to 
extort material compensation for damage done by innumer- 
able people in work which, naturally dealing with the public, 
must or may offend a large number of individuals. On the 
other hand it must also be admitted that such privilege 
carries in itself a great tendency, if not a direct inducement 
to the ready and frequent commission of offences against the 
honour and interests of law-abiding citizens, and to the en- 
couragement of untruth in its gravest and most effective 
form. 

We must realise that it is possible for any Member of 
Parliament, judicial officer, pleading lawyer — even a mem- 
ber of a local corporation — to vent his personal spite and to 
injure, in the most vital part of his honour and reputation, 
whomsoever he may personally dislike or disapprove of. At 
all events it is possible for him thus to act without let or 
hindrance and rashly to make statements impugning the 
honour of others, while knowing that no punishment of the 
law will reach him, even if his statements are untrue or ill- 
foimded, and even if they are made with malicious intent. 
It is true that some other Member of the House (if the state- 
ment be made there) may traverse such a statement and 
uphold the truth; but such rectification is left to the acci- 



Truth in Domestic Politics 95 

dent whether such an advocate of truth be forthcoming or 
toot, the presumption being that there is no abundance of 
men prepared to oppose their colleagues in the interest of 
abstract morality. 

Surely the pubUc ought to be furnished with facile, 
prompt and effectively public means of an inexpensive 
character to refute such an untruth and confirm truth, not 
only in their own interest, but in the wider interest of a moral 
Society. It is in this direction that reforms are urgently 
needed, and in spite of the complexities of legal procedure 
could readily be initiated. 

Besides these more definite sources of danger, there are 
other conditions in the life of modern democracies which are 
unfavourable to the prevalence of truth. 

Autocracy has ever been the enemy of truth because it 
does not rest upon the moral sanction of Society, but upon 
an extra-social authority which is confirmed in its unques- 
tioned irrational sway by the claims of a supernatural 
origin. In modern times the type of such an autocracy has 
been the Russian Tsardom. But contemporary history has 
shown how extremes may meet. For Russia is now enslaved 
by another autocracy, the Mob-Autocracy of the Bolsheviks. ' 
Though the Russian Tsardom was governed in its foreign as 
well as in its domestic polic}^ by a bureaucracy merely aiming 
at the increase of conquests and of power, against the relent- 
less advance of which even the Tsar himself was powerless, 
the lurid picture of the political rule of the late Tsar was at 
least relieved in its tenebrous maleficence by his action in 
ini+iating the Hague Peace Conference, and his splendid, 
almost heroic and drastic suppression of drink which was the 
central material cause of the physical and moral degradation 



96 Truth in Domestic Politics 

of his people. The Bolsheviks, it is true, began their career 
by the pronouncement of the higher moral and poUtical 
principles in opposing annexation and in upholding the 
principle of self-determination for the peoples of the world. 
In so far they may have anticipated the powerful pronounce- 
ment of the leading principles for the national and inter- 
national guidance of the world as put in a lasting and classic 
form by President Wilson. But they have since then denied, 
both in principle and practice, the moral grounds upon which 
their revolution rested. They have substituted for the 
abolition of international war the initiation of class war 
throughout the world; and, while proclaiming the moral 
and political rights of labour and of the labourers (to which 
practically all citizens in every country belong), they are 
endeavouring to establish the tyranny of one group of 
labourers — those of the hand — over all other groups, 
especially those who labour with the head. They are on 
their part endeavouring to establish the rule of force in its 
most brutal and degrading form, thereby denying the whole 
moral evolution of the world throughout the ages. 

Leaving these two forms of autocracy and tyranny — 
Tsardom and Bolshevism — if we now turn to the modern 
democracies, we find that, before the war and since the war, 
the establishment of the rule of truth has been endangered 
by three groups of forces, which the economic and social 
evolution of the modern conditions of life have produced 
among us, and whose influence can be traced to the detri- 
ment of the prevalence of truth which we wish to see 
established in every one of our civihsed and democratic 
nations. These three forces can be identified with the 
Politician, the Millionaire, and the Journalist. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE POLITICIAN 

The modern politician tends to become the journalist in 
action. The power of ready formulation and of ready and 
emphatic enunciation, coupled with the manipulative skill 
in directing the machinery of public life, is more and more 
likely to become the decisive factor of success as it also 
absorbs most of the thought and energy of the successful 
politician. Thus the means of government tend to over- 
shadow and to absorb the end of government, as the party 
machine and its efficient working in itself, as well as the 
repair of its internal construction, absorb the attention to 
the exclusion of the great work which the machine itself has 
to do^. This applies as well to the definite departmental 
work in government (with which I have dealt above) as it 
does to the ultimate social and moral ends of governing a 
nation for its own welfare and for the good of a wider 
humanity beyond it. While thus there have been but few 
statesmen in modern times whose knowledge of specific de- 
partments in public life was outstanding, there have been 
still fewer in the immediate past whose political activity was 
directed and inspired by wider ideals of national and 
humanitarian progress. Whatever criticisms may be urged 
against many aspects and incidents in the political career 
of the two great leaders of British politics in the last genera- 
tion, Disraeli and Gladstone, it must be conceded that they 
stand out on the horizon line of European politics as having 

* Se^ Patriotism^ Naiional <f,nd Interng,tional, Chap. v. pp. 87 seq. 



98 The Politician 

been actuated by great and insistent ultimate ideals, the 
influence of which can be traced in almost every one of their 
definite policies, as it also inspired and illumined their 
stupendous energy and work and was undoubtedly the 
determining factor in their influence upon the mass of the 
people, and their practical success as leaders of men. With 
Disraeli, these ideals were those of a largely conceived im- 
perialism, as the realisation of the destiny of the historical 
life of the English people; and the growth in power of this 
British Empire was in no way to be divorced from the 
elevation in prospect and in tone of British national life, 
still less from the happiness and advancement of humanity 
at large. The thrilling watchword and piercing beacon-light 
in the political and private life of Gladstone was the Cause 
of Liberty coupled with tolerance — both liberty and toler- 
ance fused into an active and dominating Christianity. This 
Christianity was literally conceived as the Christianity of the 
Anglican Church, which might unite with, but should trans- 
fuse and dominate all other forms of Christian worship, as it 
would inspire and direct the moral character of all the 
people of the earth to the improvement and elevation of 
their lives. Whatever compromise may have been made in 
the realisation of these great ideals by these two statesmen 
— consciously, or subconsciously — the permeating presence 
in their public and their private life and the modification of 
their lives and their activity by these ideals are undeniable. 
It is difiicult to find the right focus for visualising public 
men in the immediate present, standing, as we necessarily 
do, so close to them. Several, if not all of them, are un- 
doubtedly men of moral integrity and have high ideals of 
life. Moreover this tragic war has stirred the nations as well 
as the statesmen to formulate the national aims at thieir 



The PolitiGiati 99 

highest and to bring them into direct relation with the ideals 
of civilised humanity. Every exponent of the national will 
of the Alhes has risen to this high task of statesmanship, 
culminating in the monumental pronouncements of Ameri- 
can War Aims by President Wilson. 

But with this admission, which might, no doubt, be ex- 
tended to several other modern statesmen, the fact still re- 
mains that the absorption of the end of government into the 
means of governing and its machinery, is so great, that even 
these leaders have often deliberately turned, or involun- 
tarily drifted, from the road which leads to the highest 
democratic form of government to the tortuous by-paths of 
party management and political trickery; furthermore that 
their knowledge of the facts of economic, social and political 
life was incomplete, often superficial and characterised by 
both haste and opportunism — in one word that they were 
wanting in the strong and refined sense of truth, as we have 
hitherto endeavoured to define it, and that their actions were 
not guided and permeated by it. In consequence the power 
of those who are really in possession of the knowledge and 
the skill to perform the definite tasks which public life 
imposes, is, by our political system, weakened, if not en- 
tirely dissolved, while still less effectiveness can, through 
this, be given to the endeavours of those whose maturity of 
thought and singleness of purpose lead them to devote them- 
selves to the realisation of the ideals which are truly and 
adequately expressive of the best that is in us and in our age. 

Whatever the untold misery caused by this war may be, 
the personal grief and loss which it has brought to millions 
of people in every part of the civilised world, the destruction 
of the best manhood, physical and moral, in each of the 
nations, the absolute annihilation of treasure and the 



100 The Politician 

material impoverishment of the whole world, the demoral- 
isation of mankind as regards its valuation of human life 
and the conduct of life as regards human fraternity and love 
as well as honourable and truthful dealings with all men — 
in spite of all these losses, among the compensations in self- 
sacrifice and heroism and many heroic virtues which it has 
evoked, one of the most valuable and — let us hope — ^most 
lasting results in the political life of civilised nations will be, 
that, more especially through the official pronouncements of 
President Wilson, the political aims and ideals of modern 
democracy, at once lofty and practical, have been formulated 
with unassailable clearness and decision. Whatever history 
may decide as to President Wilson's responsibility for the 
lateness of the date at which the United States entered the 
war — (which, had it been earlier, might have led to a more 
speedy termination of the conflict) — he will stand forth in 
all ages as having followed the traditions of Washington and 
Lincoln who forced great moral issues, as the determining 
factors, into national and international politics, so that these 
moral factors can no longer be ignored — and have now in 
fact for all belligerents become the conscious aims for which 
the nations are fighting^. Nor, as regards the special subject 
with which we are here deahng, must we forget that, in one 
of his subsequent messages to Congress, he announced that 
*'The Russians were poisoned by the same falsehoods which 
kept the German people in the dark. The only antidote is 
the truth." 

It rests with us to see that after the war this raising of the 
platform of national and international politics is not suc- 
ceeded by a period of relapse into the lower strata of party 
politics and of cynical contest to uphold separate interests, 
^ See Patriotism, l^ational and International, li. pp. 3 seq. 



The Politician loi 

and that there is no reaction into the poHtical repudiation of 
our moral standards caused by a just denial and resentment 
of Pacifist Inopportunism, Bolshevik ineptitude or treachery 
or Socialist substitution of class-rivalry and economic tyranny 
for the higher social and moral aspirations, national as well 
as international. For, unfortunately, the leading principles 
of higher social and international morality have been arro- 
gated to themselves, and been disfigured and caricatured, 
by these three political factions during the war itself; and 
the natural antagonism against these bodies may include 
and carry with it a reaction against the ideas and ideals in 
no sense theirs, but emphatically belonging to all right- 
thinking men who have fought this war in order to uphold 
them^. 

^ I cannot resist giving in full a letter written by a soldier at the 
front and published in The Spectator of Jan. 26, 1918, which forcibly 
impresses our duty for the future. "The domestic political situation 
in Great Britain is obscure and depressing. The flower of the popu- 
lation is fighting, and the weeds are scrambling for money and power. 
Agitators and self-assertive little men have produced a war- weariness 
in this country which at times looks like black treason to the men 
in the trenches. Submarines have diminished our food supplies; 
aeroplanes have bombed London. These are as trifles to the sufferings 
which a soldier bears during one hour of battle ; but the faint-hearts 
groan and grow weary, and the Yellow Press, prostituting itself for 
an increased circulation, gives words to the feelings of the poltroons. 
They clamour for new Ministers, new Admirals, more bread and more 
cinemas. The self-sacrificing idealism, the imagination needed to 
picture to themselves what is at stake, they lack. Who will stimulate 
them to it? Not Mr Lloyd George, whose oratory is fine but whose 
reUability they rightly doubt. Not the Church, whose leaders still 
speak in the language of the classics to those who better understand 
the language of Billingsgate. Not Sir Arthur Yapp, whose tongue 
tries to do what his hands cannot. Not the soldiers, for they have 
lost all patience and can no longer persuade, but must abuse if they 
speak at all. Any man who would claim to be a statesman now must 
soon lift up his voice and tell these people that it is not their wretched 



loz The Politician 

It is not unlikely that the contest among the parties in 
each State and among the nations, in the immediate future, 
will centre round the question of moral principles and their 
effective guidance of national and international politics — 

homes, nor their miserable daily wage, nor the bread with which they 
fill their flabby beUies for which miUions of men have laid down their 
lives. It is a great and high ideal of freedom and peace for which we 
are fighting, and, if we lose the war, hfe -will not be worth Uving even 
if we have food for our stomachs and palaces to live in. Let it not. 
be thought that all the people in these islands are of this wretched 
way of thinking. It is only the clamorous few. The great mass of 
the people are working hard for victory, but they also hardly know 
what victory or defeat means. They lack imagination; they have 
not seen great cities in ruins, women violated, children crucified. 
They see only through a glass darkly what the people of France and 
Belgium have seen face to face, and they are only too ready to be 
'led' by any so-called 'leader' who may arise among them. Such 
'leaders* usually appeal to the mere material wants of their hearers; 
they are usually men of a narrow class outlook, whose ' world ' is at 
its largest England, and at its smallest the industrial centre in which 
they hve. What is needed is a real leader of Labour, a man who can 
combine his interest in the working man with an interest in and 
inteUigent perception of world-poUtics, a man who will sink the so- 
called 'class-war' in the greater issue of the world-war by teaching 
the people how the Alhes are fighting that very battle against a 
ruling military class, which should appeal to every democrat the 
world over. Such a man must be ready to impress on his hearers the 
iieed for sacrifice at home and the need for thrift. This need will be 
felt after the war, and the men and women who have squandered 
large wages will regret their folly : these very people have now in their 
hands the means of producing more 'social reform' than a dozen 
Acts of Parhament can procure them. They could have good houses, 
good boots and good food, and set aside a sum for their old age, at 
the same time lending it to their country. Yet too many are simply 
throwing away their money on cheap jewellery, pianos that they 
cannot play, and drink. Social reform must come from below, and 
no Act of Parhament can succeed unless the people set themselves 
to improve their own homes. What is our education doing? If it is 
not teaching it is useless. One thing stands but as certain amid all 
the pessimism of people who are too concerned with the smaller 



The Politician 103 

the clash between class-interests, the interests of occupations 
pronounced to be sufficient grounds for party differences and 
conflicts by the "practical men," and the insistence upon the 
guidance and determination of such interests by higher 
moral and social ideas and ideals by those who claim the 
subordination of political and economic interests to moral 
needs and aspirations. There will be also extreme Nation- 
alists and Internationalists in foreign politics. Perhaps the 
first political contest will be waged on the question of the 
equitable distribution of economic opportunity among 
nations^; and here the cleavage will be the support or the 
denial of the moral and equitable factor which each party 
will give. 

In any case we may hope that the politician of the 
future will, by the weight of historic events, be forced to 
consider, and to be actively guided by, the higher moral 
factors and aims in the life of each nation and of civilised 
humanity. 

material issues in life. If we as a people preserve the will to win, and 
exercise the energy and endurance which the soldiers in France are 
proving to be the great inheritance of the British race, we can and 
we shall win the war. If we can get back at least some of the high 
enthusiasm and ideaUsm of 19 14, we shall also win the peace which 
will follow it. But if we sacrifice the blood and treasure of this 
Empire for a mere return to the status quo ante, then England, though 
great to all outward appearance and victorious in battle, will never 
again be a great nation among the nations of the world. We must 
take into our hearts the high aspirations and noble ideals of those • 
who have fought in the line and of those who have died. They did 
not fight for wealth or for comfort, but for truth and for justice, for 
the defence of the weak against the oppression of the strong, and for 
the destruction of the old ideas which have brought forth war. War 
may not be destroyed for ever by this war, but it will have received 
a staggering blow. The subsequent peace in course of time may 
banish it for ever from the earth." 

1 See Preface to the American edition of Aristodemocracy, etc. 



104 The Politician 

In these deficiencies of the State, however, there is one re- 
deeming and consoHng factor which is absent in the cases of 
the milhonaire and the journahst. The pohtician is remov- 
able, and it lies legally and directly within the power of the 
democracy to change and replace him by another, if he has 
been unsuccessful or has acted reprehensibly. It is not so in 
the case of the millionaire and the journalist. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE MILLIONAIRE 

The millionaire may be assassinated by a criminal, whose 
motives are those of personal vindictiveness, or by a wrong- 
headed fanatic. But such isolated and reprehensible re- 
movals of a single millionaire in no way alter the system by 
which stupendous power is given to individuals without any 
public or private responsibility. I am not referring to the 
financial and commercial control placed in the hands of the 
millionaire by the accretion of great wealth, growing in pro- 
portion with this increase, which very accretion favours the 
growth of his power^; but I am considering the moral (in 
many cases distinctly immoral) social and poUtical power 
given to these men even in spheres most remote from the 
direct increase of wealth. Such men are often endowed with 
power equal to that of the State, in many cases surpassing 
it, to create or to modify moral and social institutions, re- 
ligious movements and all that makes for national education. 
They can found new institutions, encourage or discourage 
social organisations, charities and educational bodies. As 
their encouragement is directly effective, so too is their dis- 
couragement. It will readily be seen how the actions of 
those in charge of such institutions, depending upon volun- 
tary contributions to their funds, will be affected by the 

^ I have dwelt elsewhere upon this irresponsible power of the 
miUionaire as being contrary to "good poUcy." See The Political 
Confession of a Practical Idealist, London (John Murray), 191 1, 
pp. 22 seq. ; Aristodemocracy , etc., Appendix IV. pp. 382 — 395. 



io6 The Millionaire 

granting of large contributions or the withholding of the 
same. Such individual financial autocrats may have it in 
their power to impress the stamp of their own immature or 
distorted intellectual conceptions of what the immediate and 
ultimate preparation for life ought to be upon the educa- 
tional system and character of a whole nation or a whole 
age. Though these men may sometimes be actuated by high 
and unselfish aims, their own intellectual education and 
aspirations may be far below the level of the average society 
in which they live. It is even probable that- the bias which 
their successful business career, — continuous and all-ab- 
sorbing in its concentration upon one not too lofty aim,— 
may give to their mentality, definitely unfits them for the 
apprehension of the moral and intellectual aims of education. 
No doubt these men are able to seek and to find the advice 
of trustworthy experts to guide them in their excursions 
into the field of public education. There have indeed been 
instances in which their interference has been distinctly 
salutary and beneficent. But there are innumerable cases in. 
which — though they have not encouraged what is mani- 
festly bad or useless — yet the discouragement of studies not 
appealing to their materialistic minds, and the narrow 
directions in which their benefactions have been most 
effective, have entirely altered the due proportion and re- 
lationship of the several departments of intellectual and 
moral training within the community and have— to use 
medical terms — produced atrophy on the one side and 
hypertrophy on the other. The result would be, that, if 
their interventions and schemes were to prevail over all 
others without restriction, the whole mentahty of a nation 
or of an age might be distorted or vitiated. To say the 
least : the successful financier is not an expert in educational 



The Millionaire 107 

matters, and if his pronouncements are made and accepted 

as thorough and as final, the result is a lie. What is still 

more important is that this power for harm is entirely an 

irresponsible one and that the evil-doer or bungler in matters 

of such great pubhc concern is irremovable. 

Such a millionaire may buy, and often has 

The News- bought up, a newspaper. To all intents and 

"bo/bey Pyo~ 

prietor'^. purposes he thus becomes a journalist or, at 

all events, one who wields journalistic power 

^ Since this book was written a discussion has taken place in the 
House of Commons as to the admissibihty of proprietors of news- 
papers to Government office. My own opinion on this question is, 
that proprietors and editors of newspapers — the journahsts — are as 
ehgible to represent the country in Parhament and to hold office as 
are the representatives of any other profession or business. Indeed, 
it appears to me that, if they directly advise the public as to the 
settlement of matters of State, upholding definite poUcies or views, 
they should do this as manifest advocates of views they hold, so 
that they can be personally identified with their pubHshed opinions 
and, above all, made responsible for their utterances and propaganda. 
Moreover it will then be possible for the pubhc either to confirm them 
in power or to remove them from office and from their seat in Parha- 
ment. At present they may exercise power as great, or even greater 
than, that of any member of the Government, hidden behind the 
joumahstic machinery, personally unidentified and in no way re- 
sponsible for the pohcy they uphold — moreover irremovable from 
their own seat of hidden power. Furthermore, as in the case of any 
business or professional man who resigns his business connexions 
when entering the Government, they ought conscientiously and 
effectively to sever all connexion with the newspapers in which they 
have been interested and in no way use them, directly or indirectly, 
to enforce their own opinions. It may be impracticable to enact a 
law that a newspaper proprietor or journahst should not use his own 
press-organ in support of his candidature for Parhament during an 
election : but at least a custom ought to be estabhshed, in conformity 
with the EngUsh-speaking tradition of fair-play and fair fighting, 
that one of the contestants should not use arms of which his opponent 
is deprived. 

Since the above was written an interview with Lord NorthcHffe 

. w. T. 7 



io8 The Millionaire 

in the most effective form. As a matter of fact, not only the 
individual miUionaire, but groups of financial interests, large 
financial corporations and Stock Exchange manipulators, 
do control newspapers. In many cases this is freely admitted 
and accepted by public opinion ; and it will be said in some 
countries that one paper is owned by a certain group of 
financial or industrial interests, a second by another; The 
power of the great armament firms wielded through jour- 
nalistic channels has been frequently exposed and com- 
mented upon. They control, not only newspapers in their 
own country, but even in the countries of their prospective 
allies or enemies, the news in which is distinctly coloured by 
the red glare of war. In a less direct way, not as the owners 
of the newspaper, but as those who possess certain degrees 
of power over them, large industrial and commercial con- 
cerns, whose business depends to a great extent upon profuse 
advertising, may claim and receive important concessions in 

(who had taken charge of an important department of War Propa- 
ganda under the Government) has been published in the press of 
April 27, 1918: 

"Lord NorthcliflEe replying to a telephone inquiry yesterday, stated 
that while he has protested publicly and privately against the recent 
weakening of the War Cabinet, he has agreed, at the request of the 
Prime Minister, and other members of the Cabinet to continue the 
difficult and delicate work in which he is engaged until the Govern- 
ment can find someone else to carry on his tasks. He is in no sense 
a member of the Government, and has declined to become one, in 
order that his newspapers may be free to speak plainly about certain 
aspects of the political and miUtary situation." 

It will be seen that a newspaper proprietor, whose several news- 
papers are of exceptional power in directly forming or influencing 
pubUc opinion in accordance with his personal opinions, accepts 
direct official work under the Government, yet surprisingly — or at 
least with astonishing naivete — refuses to become responsible for these 
opinions to the pubhc in the ordinary system of political responsibihty 
adopted by all democratic countries. 



The Millionaire 109 

the distribution of news and the expression of opinion, even 
among the leading newspapers. I remember an instance in 
the United States, when I was informed that a certain 
matter would, if desired, be kept out of the papers by the 
intervention of a friendly proprietor of a great department- 
store, whose requests were, by implication or by direct 
threat, backed by the power of withholding his costly ad- 
vertisements from such a paper. 

In many cases, however, the millionaire and even the 
financial corporations who control the newspapers, do not 
concentrate their influence on the editing of them for the 
furtherance of their definite business interests, but extend 
their arbitrary power in asserting their personal opinions or 
hobbies, which, without clearly indicating to the public any 
trace of origin and authority, may thus force upon the world, 
by the privilege of this form of monopoly in publicity, their 
own predilection, prejudices or antagonisms. There are 
even cases, far from infrequent, in which the personal pre- 
ferences, animosities or capricious likes or dislikes of such 
financial potentates concerning public men and even private 
individuals, are directly manifested and made efficient in the 
most powerful form of publicity, without any possibility of 
self-defence on the part of the victim. All public men know 
what " a good press " or " a bad press " means. The acts and 
public pronouncements, occasional speeches as well as publi- 
cations, of statesmen, public servants, authors and artists, 
can receive full or very meagre attention, fair or unfair, 
favourable or unfavourable notices, and this may be de- 
cided, not only by the political or acknowledged bias of the 
paper, or even by the personal bias of the editor and his staff, 
but by the personal malevolence or caprice of the proprietor. 
There are undeniable cases in which the proprietors of news- 

7—2 



no The Millionaire 

papers have directly used their journalistic organ to repri- 
mand and to injure in the lighter social sphere of life people 
of whose actions and personalities they disapproved. I 'was 
credibly informed some years ago by the sub-editor of a 
paper, that in their ofhce there existed for consultation a 
Black List, provided for their use by the proprietor, which 
contained the names of all persons of whom he had reason 
to disapprove and whose names were never to be mentioned 
in his newspaper; and that this ostracism even extended to 
the members of their families. Whether they made speeches 
or wrote books, whether they or their wives or daughters 
opened bazaars or were present at social gatherings, their 
names were not to appear in his paper. Such petty use of 
power is perhaps unimportant and not worthy of considera- 
tion. But it certainly does not uphold the standard of 
Truth, and gives power of evil-doing and of annoying one's 
neighbour — not to consider at all the grosser criminal or 
quasi-criminal forms of blackmail, resorted to by practically 
criminal proprietors of the lower kinds of newspapers — not 
only to the proprietor and editor, but to every member of 
the staff, down to the lowest and most illiterate reporter of 
scraps of news. All this lowers the standard of veracity and 
general morality in the community, and may cause grave 
harm or unmerited annoyance, as in most cases it cannot be 
redressed or remedied. 

So far, I have merely dealt with the clearly condemnable. 
developments of irresponsible power in the hands of the 
newspaper proprietors. Now, there is no doubt that many 
of these men are not actuated by any lower motives of this 
kind. They may even be wise, good, patriotic and public- 
spirited men. It can safely be asserted that, though there 
has been a steady degeneration of character and tone in 



The Millionaire in 

English journalism within the last thirty years, the news- 
papers of Great Britain have kept a comparatively high level 
of integrity and freedom from directly personal interference 
on the part of their proprietors. On several occasions where 
these did interfere, they did so — at least conscientiously 
and professedly — from patriotic motives. In some cases 
this interference may have been both timely and useful ; in 
others, it has been the reverse. The more eftective it has 
been, however, the more dangerous is the establishment of 
a tradition in which any individual, not directly responsible 
to the public for his public acts, can use the stupendous 
and unique power which the possession of the monopoly of 
publicity gives, without redress, without granting to his 
opponents an equal power of bringing home to the public the 
opposing news in the same emphatic and effective medium, 
and without the power vested in the democracy of deposing 
the holder of such national machinery of public influence from 
his position. If any man, through the accidental possession 
of this monopoly (accidental as far as the expression of the 
public will is concerned) becomes the mouthpiece of the 
nation's opinion and the leader and guide of the public will, he 
ought to be called on to form a government and to be subject 
to all the responsibilities of his high office. Every word and 
every action of his ought thus to be clearly identified with 
him personally, be open to criticism and censure, and he 
ought to be removable from the spheres of public influence 
should the nation disapprove of his action. As it is, what- 
ever happens, whether his predictions as well as his state- 
ments have been discredited, the direct power of influencing 
public opinion, as far as the machinery of publicity is con- 
cerned, remains intact in his hands. 
The abuses and the evil influence exercised through these 



112 The Millionaire 

channels of newspaper publicity are not only or chiefly con- 
fined to the accident of power placed in the hands of a 
corrupt, unfair or injudicious newspaper proprietor, they 
are essential to the very nature of the newspaper itself in the 
development of modern journalism. They are influential in 
producing the type of the modern journalist, from the 
editor to the humblest reporter as he has been evolved by 
the modern newspaper itself, and are effective in the educa- 
tion of the journalist and the conception of his career even 
in its highest form. What, above all, concerns us here is 
the effect of journalism in lowering and demorahsing the 
central factor in public moralit}^ namely, the sen'se of Truth. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE PROFESSIONAL JOURNALIST 

The dominating and all-absorbing object in the purveying 
of news, over-riding all other aims — in fact ignoring and 
brushing them aside when they obstruct — is to provide the 
earliest news, the most sensational news, in the most sen- 
sational form, which will arrest the attention of the reader. 
Even if there be no ulterior and more reprehensible object 
in the management of a newspaper such as we have indi- 
cated above, and even if the interests of one or other of the 
political parties do not modify the selection, distribution 
and presentation of news, these aims are nevertheless the 
dominating and guiding principles of successful journalism. 
I am ignoring those flagrant and manifestly criminal cases 
which unfortunately abound, in which false news is de- 
liberately spread. 

But it is evident that in this race for priority 
Pv^ication ^^ pubhcation the careful weighing and testing 

of facts in order to ensure Truth are impossible, 
and that haste of statement is not only not conducive to the 
estabhshment of Truth, but that it is a factor which itself 
undermines the moral and intellectual quality of thorough- 
ness essential to a truth-loving nature. The man whose 
mentality is absorbingly and habitually filled with the one 
desire of haste in statement, is not likely to develop a con- 
scientious striving after Truth. On the contrary he is in aU 
probabiHty bound to blunt his fine sense of this cardinal 
virtue. Now the competition between the several news- 



114 The Professional Journalist 

papers to be first in the publication of any news is so keen, 
that it has often led to the gravest injuries to the public 
interest and even to tragic pain to large numbers of indi- 
viduals. Who, for instance, can forget the misery caused to 
many a family when the false news was spread that the 
British Legation at Pekin, besieged by the Chinese, had 
fallen into the enemy's hands and all the men, women and 
children who had sought refuge there, had probably been 
murdered ? 

Next to the priority in the distribution of news 
Selection of comes the selection of the most sensational 
sationalism. news. In no way do I wish to limit selection 

in the choice of news, which, on the face of it, 
is of deep concern and most directly touches the interests 
of the large mass of the people. The test for such selection 
is to be found in what in one phrase we should call Public 
Concern. The values are set by the relative importance of 
news. But the choice is in many, if not in most, cases 
actually determined by the startling character of the news 
which forcibly arrests attention, irrespective of its conform- 
ing to the interests of the public ; it is not determined by its 
true intrinsic importance. It thus becomes sensational. In 
the relative proportion of things which concern the life of a 
nation, the facts are exaggerated and distorted and in so far 
falsified. 

StiU more is this the case when the personal 
Obtrusion of and private concerns of people's lives are 

tJtB PBysoytQfL 

Side of Life. grotesquely treated as matters of national 
importance and obtruded upon public notice, 
merely to gratify the morbid or vulgar curiosity of our lower 
instincts. Even if they do not come within the pale of what 
is technically called slander or libel, they respond to this 



The Professional Journalist 115 

lower tendency in human nature which they habitually en- 
courage — itself, as we have seen above, destructive of the 
sense of Truth. 

If these strictures are justified with regard to 
Journaltsiic the selection and distribution of facts, they 
Style. still more emphatically apply to the literary 

form in which they are presented to the public. 
I am not referring to the sensational headlines which have 
come into vogue within the last generation. Much can be 
urged in their favour on the ground of convenience, in en- 
abling the reader systematically and rapidly to scan the 
paper for the news in which he is concerned and which 
interests him. But this supreme aim of arresting attention 
goes far be^^ond the headlines and permeates all forms of 
exposition and composition in journalistic writing. I am not 
even considering the supremely grotesque and vulgar 
literar^^ solecisms to which the compressed headlines in 
many newspapers lead. But even in the more temperate 
and superior editing of our leading papers, sensational ex- 
aggeration in form and diction is day by day encroaching 
upon the rule of veracity as well as of good taste. The 
ultimate goal that apparently is being thus approached in 
journalistic style is the standard of the advertising agent — 
as no doubt this important factor in newspaper management 
does exert the most potent influence in the evolution of 
modern journalism. The one aim is to catch the eye and to 
arrest attention. I venture to believe that one of the leading 
characteristics of the literary mentality and style of our age 
may hereafter be considered the rule of exaggerated diction 
and of humorous paradox ; as on the negative side it has led 
to the horror of the platitude, a sneering attribute often 
appUed to Truth. Even in the literary character of our 



ii6 The Professional Journalist 

leading writers, some of whom may win a permanent place 
in English hterature, together with many remarkable and 
outstanding qualities, we may discover this modern taint of 
exaggeration in diction, over-emphasis leading to coarseness, 
humour to cynicism and paradox blunting veracity. In any 
case, our literature has been infected by the "Journalese." 

If this is the effect upon the literary world, the 
Effect on the cumulative effect upon the wider reading 
Public? public is still more disastrous as regards the 

refinement of taste and veracity. And when 
we consider that perhaps three-quarters — it may even be 
nine-tenths — of the reading of the civilised world is confined 
to the daily newspapers, their influence upon moral and 
intellectual mentality, especially on that side of it which 
interests us here, can readily be gauged. 



CHAPTER VII. 
THE IDEAL JOURNALIST 

Such being the character and essential nature of newspapers, 
with their main objects and ideals, it follows that the pro- 
fession of the modern journalist has developed into the 
wrong channels and that, from the nature of his career, and 
even the system of his education and preparation, his 
activity is not conducive to the development of a high sense 
of Truth — in fact that it is all wrong. I will forbear to 
exhibit the lowest form of the blackmailing "penny-a-liner" 
and of the self-seeking Streber with low or distorted ideals, 
who stand self-condemned before all right-minded people. 
Yet we must remember that their power of public evil and 
of private spite is infinitely raised by their association with 
this monopolised form of general publicity; and that even 
men and women of high standing and eminence are powerless 
against their machinations. I will confine myself to the very 
highest forms of the journalistic type, men who themselves 
have the loftiest conception of their profession and their 
duties. Their education and career encourage superficial 
knowledge, the hasty adoption of decided views, exaggerated 
diction, and the appeal to passion and prejudice or un- 
justifiable curiosity on the part of the reading public — all 
of which is directly opposed to our conception of Truth. 

I recall with pleasure a striking conversation which I had 
more than twenty years ago in a foreign capital with one of 
the best types of modern journalists. He was then in the 
early stages of his eminently successful career, intensely 



ii8 The Ideal Journalist 

keen as regards the work and outlook of his profession, full 
of enthusiasm for the good he was convinced it could do in 
the world, and determined to carry into effect its best pur- 
pose and to uphold its highest ideals. He was determined to 
persevere in fitting himself by arduous study and work in 
the preparation for his special craft, and never to lose sight 
of its higher ultimate aims. I do not know what exactly his 
previous education was. I doubt whether he had the advan- 
tage of an academic education in one of the more prominent 
universities, and whether there was any subject in which he 
at any time received special and thorough training. In 
watching his subsequent career, I must admit that he has 
done remarkable work, some of it undeniably and eminently 
good. But at the same time there is evidence of distinct 
limitations in his horizon-line of vision, experience and 
understanding. There is also evidence of distinct narrowness 
and some leading prejudices, though there can be no doubt 
of his ardent patriotism and his general longing for enlighten- 
ment. 

He had listened patiently and attentively to my attack 
upon his profession, especially on the ground of its encour- 
aging superficiality of study and exposition, as compared 
with the thorough training and the thorough work of the 
specialist in science and learning, and of the evils resulting 
from the effective diffusion of such imperfect knowledge. 

"Ah," he said, " you forget that I am — or rather, that the 
perfect journalist is — also a specialist. We journahsts 
specialise in one department of intellectual life, concentrate 
our attention upon it, train every faculty to contribute to 
this one task, by perseverance and self-abnegation to perfect 
the thought-machine for the work it has to do, as much as 
any of your scientific, historical, philosophic or artistic 



The Ideal Journalist 119 

specialists prepare themselves for their work. Our specialty 
is the rapid induction from the facts of life to meet the 
demands of, and to satisfy the need for, immediate informa- 
tion, which the pulsating rush of life claims, and rightly 
claims, as one of the essential requisites of its rational, in- 
tellectual as well as practical existence. The world cannot 
wait for the slow and deliberate elaboration of the material 
essential to life in the isolated -study of your philosopher and 
scientist. Long before these have come to a conclusion and 
have .deigned to present their results to an impatient world, 
the need for action has come and gone, and the public would 
be left without any guidance at all if it had depended upon 
them. Moreover, mark you, I have referred to the isolated 
study of the philosopher. The very quahties which go to the 
making of a true scientist and philosopher, the theoretic 
faculty, relegate him to the cloistered cell, the 'verfluchtes, 
dumpfes Mauerloch' whence Faust broke forth to throw 
himself into the vortex of life. He need not be a complete 
recluse; but his training as well as his intellectual predis- 
position and the high objects of his work, probably, if not 
necessarily, exclude him from the rushing and palpitating 
life about him — he is out of touch with Hfe. Meanwhile the 
public is clamouring for enlightenment and guidance, and 
it asks for this direct and at once. It is I who must give it. 
It is the rapidity of judgment, the ahnost automatic spon- 
taneity in forming an opinion on the facts before me, the 
right instinct of setting the right values on such facts for 
the purposes and needs of the public whom I wish to en- 
lighten, the whetting of the perceptions and, above all, of 
the reasoning powers, so that they may work unhampered by 
irrelevant or obstructive considerations which do not con- 
duce to rapid judgment, so that in the shortest possible time, 



I20 The Ideal Journalist 

my thought-machine should produce the right conclusions. 
This faculty of the mind can itself be trained to such a high 
degree of working perfection that, compared with the same 
mental instruments of your recluse student, it works as the 
fingers of a trained virtuoso on a musical instrument can 
correctly give the scales, trills and quavers as well as the 
fuller chords, compared to the slow, stiff and bungUng 
manipulation of even a great musical composer who has not 
practised the manipulation of the instrument. He cannot 
think rapidly ; I can. I am training myself to do it. I have 
specialised in this great department of human knowledge — 
which is surely not without some importance. Will you deny 
me the right to do this? Will you think me arrogant and 
presumptuous if I claim to be a colleague and peer to your 
specialists of the noble House of the Mind? Is there not even 
some moral justification for my calHng and some noble 
aspirations in following its clamorous appeal? 

"Now, remember, that I have definite facts to deal with, 
to study, to hunt up, to dig for, quite apart from the art of 
expression, the literary power of persuasion and the adapta- 
tion of my style to reach the ears, to force and hold the 
attention of the confused and stolid mass of people called the 
Public. Here in the centre of this industrial, intellectual, 
pohtical and international activity, I must constantly keep 
myself in touch with every manifestation of hfe, with every 
class and group of society, from the highest officials down to 
the hungry and humble labourer; I must suppress all social 
likings and prejudices, I must be friends with them all, hear 
what they have to say and balance the right and wrong of it, 
and then focus it in the light of the national interests of my 
country and the interests and the tastes of the public for 
whom my paper caters. Does this attitude of mind and the 



The Ideal Journalist 121 

discipline it exacts not constitute a specialty? Could you or 
any of the truth-seekers you admire fulfil this task? Try it 
and let us see what will be the result ! I have my work, you 
have yours. Yours may be better than mine. But there is 
need for my work in the world, and I mean to do it as well 
as I can." 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THIS 
IDEAL OF JOURNALISM 

My answer to him was then, and would be now, the follow- 
ing: "I take it that there are three main divisions in the 
preparation for, and the fulfihnent of, the great and impor- 
tant task you have set yourself, not in any way severed from 
one another in your mind, but all working together, inter- 
penetrating one another organically in your own mind for 
one great object. Though they are thus intended to be fused 
and united, it will help us to arrive at the truth in sub- 
dividing them and considering them first singly and then in 
their organic unity. There is, in the first place, the important 
task of getting at the facts, the information with which you 
have to deal. After that follows the forming of your judg- 
ment on these facts. And there is in the third place the 
exposition of these facts and judgments in a striking and 
emphatic form, which is again modified by what you con- 
sider to be the needs of the public for whom you cater. 

" Let me at once concede that I do not quarrel 
News 

with the first of these tasks, and that I admit 

the great utility. You will see, as we proceed, that I con- 
sider this the chief, if not the only, function of journalism in 
the literal meaning of that term, i.e. of ephemeral writing, 
of the daily newspaper. But even this paltry, and, no doubt, 
to your mind, grudging admission of mine I must limit, be- 
cause of the very organic nature of the journaHstic faculty 
as you have described it, and on account of which you might 
reasonably have opposed my sub-division of your work into 



Ideal of Journalism 123 

three departments. It is just because the selection of these 
facts is directed by the totahty of your individual mind, as 
you have described it, and is therefore coloured by your 
constitutional and dominant aim of the second and third 
requirements of the journalist, that I would even qualify and 
limit your absolute fitness for determining what are im- 
portant and what are unimportant facts. Because you are 
to use the innumerable facts of life in order to form an 
immediate and rapid judgment ; and, above all, because they 
are destined for a definite newspaper, with its own social and 
political bias and for a definite public, well- or ill- (generally 
ill) prepared critically to receive such judgment ; and more- 
over, because you must be guided by the individual likings 
and intellectual interests (in no way including the love of 
Truth) of such a public; and, finally, because the form and 
style of imparting this knowledge would naturally partake 
of the nature of the emphatic, exaggerated, sensational and 
advertising character of modern journaHsm. For all these 
reasons, I do not think that your special training and men- 
tality are best fitted truthfully and unerringly to convey 
news. Were the newspaper to be merely the news' paper the 
utiHty and justifiabiUty of this your main function would be 
undeniable. 

"Even as it is, this, the most important part of your pro- 
fessional work is not (or at all events ought not to be) con- 
fined to your craft. It ought to be one of the most important 
functions of our diplomatic staff. They ought to impose 
upon themselves the arduous duty of getting into touch, and 
remaining in touch, with the metropolis and the whole 
country to which they are accredited, and to the suppression 
of all their personal social bias and preferences. They ought 
to have on their staff — and as a matter of fact, most of them 
w. T. 8 



1^4 Critical Examination of 

have — specialists who, while being men of the world, can 
also investigate commercial, industrial and financial facts 
and conditions as well as you can. Presumably even (for the 
fact that they have specialised on the study of these social 
phenomena does not put them at a disadvantage compared 
to you) they ought to select and to communicate these facts 
more efficiently than you can. I admit that these ideals in 
the staffing of our diplomatic corps are far from being 
realised ; that, to the great detriment of national and inter- 
national interests, their social intercourse is in many, if not 
in most, cases limited to definite sets which are far from 
being representative of the national, social and economic life 
of the country to which they are accredited^. You may 
perhaps rightly urge that the manifestly official position of 
the staff of an Embassy or Legation may preclude them from, 
or at least to some degree impede, their effective social 
blending with all classes of a community, and in so far be 
less favourable to the acquisition of facts which the ideal 
journalist can more readily get at. I have known cases 
among members of our own diplomatic service to whom this 
deficiency would certainly not apply. But there is no reason 
why — even without the hateful Secret Service of underhand 
spying — an embassy or a legation should not include em- 
ployees possessing the qualifications which in this respect 
you claim for the journalist. If you or your colleagues 
possess such exceptional knowledge, why should you not 
impart it (as no doubt you often do) to the official quarters, 

^ It is highly probable, for instance, that the blunders which, to 
some degree, conduced to the grave and terrifically tragic event of 
the great European War were made by the German diplomatic 
representatives in England, who were more or less confined in their 
social intercourse to definite groups far from representative of the 
national will. 



this Ideal of Journalism 125 

where it is most needed and where, presumably, the best use 
would be made of it? For remember — I really need not re- 
mind you of it— that your information is at once transmitted 
into the vortex of that haste and hurry, and often confusion, 
represented by the editorial departments of a great news- 
paper at night time; and that it is there entrusted to the 
tender mercies of a harassed sub-editor, who may or may 
not be well qualified wisely to select his news pouring in 
from all quarters. I remember your distinguished prede- 
cessor bitterly complaining to me how frequently the most 
important news and articles which he transmitted to your 
newspaper found their way into the wastepaper basket, and 
how often comparatively irrelevant messages were published 
with undue prominence. Even if there were not these fatal 
deficiencies, the great fact to which I have before alluded 
remains, that the judgment and bias of that individual news- 
paper itself, with all the possibilities of error and worse than 
error (after all, ultimately centered in one irresponsible indi- 
vidual), are not the best vehicle for transmitting even the 
truth about definite facts to a public hungering for informa- 
tion and enhghtenment^. On the other hand, such informa- 
tion and such facts transmitted through diplomatic channels 

^ It has often occurred that the selection or emphasis given to 
news, the prominence or relegation to remote corners of the paper 
or the complete suppression of some news depends upon changes of 
editors. When enquiring of those who are acquainted with the in- 
ternal business of newspapers, we have been answered: "Why, don't 
you know that the paper has changed hands? It now belongs to 
So-and-So who is keen on Protection or Free Trade, who hates the 
Scotch or the Jews." Or " this individual or group of people has now 
got a controlling interest " ; or " this editor or sub-editor (who was an 
Oxford man) is replaced by another who is a Cambridge man," etc., 
etc. Such facts, quite unknown to the reading public, modify the 
character of a paper even in the selection and publication of news. 

8—2 



126 Critical Examination of 

to a well-organised Foreign Office are there considered in 
relation to correlated information and facts from all other 
important centres and receive (or are supposed to receive) 
mature and due consideration by those entrusted with the 
national and international interests in which the public is 
concerned. Of course, the one postulate remains, and is now 
more clamorously called for than ever before in the world's 
history, namely, that the work of the Foreign Office in all 
free countries should be laid clearly before the public upon 
whom the ultimate decisions should rest in these matters as 
well as in home affairs; and that, if the public be not suffi- 
ciently trained to judge of such matters now, it ought to be 
one of the chief objects of the Foreign Office, purely in the 
light of Truth, to render these questions and problems in- 
telhgible to the average mind. I deliberately maintain that 
the facts with which foreign politics are concerned are, if 
anything, less complicated and less inaccessible to just 
apprehension than are most of the leading problems of 
economic and social life. Moreover, if the general pubUc in 
a democracy is as yet not sufficiently trained in matters of 
international interest to approach and to grasp the problems 
of diplomacy, there is no reason why such training should 
not be given to them at once, in order to fit the mass of the 
electors for a task in which they are eminently concerned, 
and for the consummation of which they are ultimately 
responsible. 

"I also readily admit to you that the student 
of Economics, ^^^ philosopher, as you have described them 

Politics and j^ the classical figure of Faust, are, by their 

Sociology. ° . /^ J 

training and their actual mentality, not fitted 

to cope with the problems of life with which your journalist 

has to deal. But even in the literary type you have chosen, 



this Ideal of Journalism 127 

pray remember that both Goethe's and Boito's Faust, after 
he had thrown himself into the healthy vortex of Hfe, ended 
as a practical world-reformer and even redeemed his un- 
natural contemplative seclusion and asceticism by passion, 
frailties and faux-pas which are not the exclusive monopoly 
of the unthinking 'practical man of the world.' There are, 
moreover, purely theoretic and scientific specialists who, 
with scientific method and in the interest of Truth, without 
haste — or certainly with less haste than your journalist — 
deal, not only with problems of physiological life, but with 
the facts of social life. I am not alluding to the historian and 
economist, whose preparatory study of the past does not 
necessarily destroy or weaken his ability to deal with the 
present and the future ; but to the sociologist and publicist. 
You surely cannot maintain that these students, deeply 
concerned with the affairs of the Hfe about us, are not 
capable of ascertaining these facts of Ufe as well as your 
journalist; that they are not aware of their importance, and 
that they are not quahfied to sift them with regard to their 
intrinsic values and the bearings which they have upon the 
needs of the living present and future. It is true that they 
are not constrained to arrive at their conclusions in one day 
or one hour; but that, after mature weighing of evidence 
and much dehberation, they communicate these facts to the 
world, in a book, a pamphlet, a magazine article, or even in 
one of our weekly journals, over their signatures. Do you 
maintain that this greater dehberation removes them further 
away from the goal of Truth, and makes their opinions less 
valuable and salutary for the pubKc mind? 

"This brings me to the second component in 
and^Hasie *^^ mental constitution of your ideal journal- 

ist. It is upon this qualification of his that you 



128 Critical Examination of 

have laid greatest stress; the faculty of rapid judgment. 
I see no need for this. On the contrary, from every point of 
view, I have been urging the necessity of withstanding the 
allurements of hasty and premature judgment. In this haste 
lurks the arch-evil; and the promoters of this evil are the 
arch-enemies in the intellectual and moral life of the people. 
You and those who think as you do may answer me by that 
fallacious shibboleth, which is constantly thrust upon us to 
account for all superficiality and all frivolous impatience in 
work and in pleasure — i.e. 'that life is short.' This really 
seems to imply that there is no time to think and that, 
though Truth may suffer, we must 'make up our minds,' or 
what we are pleased to call 'our minds.' Life is no shorter 
than it was before — nor, let me remind you, is art any 
shorter. They are both as long now as they ever were. I even 
believe that our generation (before the war) lived longer 
than those immediately preceding it. I deny that there is 
any need of making up our minds rapidly. Speculators on 
the various Exchanges and those engaged in speculative 
commercial and industrial enterprises may be ,obliged, as 
heretofore, to make up their minds rapidly, almost instan- 
taneously. The difference between former years and now is 
that the increased means of intercommunication have given 
our speculators more facts and complicated facts to deal 
with than the broader outlines of judgment which formed 
the basis of decision for the speculators and merchants of 
by-gone days. Such occupations no doubt demand the 
faculty of rapid decision. But we need not encourage the 
mental attitude of the speculator and gambler among the 
general public, and especially not in grave matters of social 
and political concern. Above all, you and your colleagues, 
whose duty, after all, it is to establish and to convey truth 



this Ideal of Journalism 129 

to the general public, ought not to encourage this mental 
attitude in them nor even in yourselves. As regards the 
public, if the facts on which their judgment is to be formed 
are too complex to enable the mass of the people to have an 
opinion, the public must then do without opinions on such 
matters and must withhold them until responsibly provided 
with the material for arriving at a just decision. But you 
journalists are the last persons — on your own showing — to 
provide them with this material. For your whole primary 
attitude of searching for news as such, of cultivating rapidity, 
or rather haste, in coming to a conclusion, are the very 
elements which are most opposed to sound judgment. More- 
over, consider that you are employed by papers representing 
the interests of poHtical parties, and, in some cases, definite 
individual interests of a less exalted and impersonal nature, 
and that your opinions are bound to be, or at least likely to 
be, influenced and vitiated by such a bias. Finally, I must 
ask you, whether your colleague whose paper represents the 
opposing party-interest, is not likely to form a judgment 
differing essentially from your own? He transmits his judg- 
ment to his paper, you to yours, and both publish them, 
presenting to a large number of readers views diametrically 
opposed to one another, which they readily and often 
passionately adopt as their own. It will then depend upon 
the circulation of the paper, itself depending upon con- 
ditions in no way relating to soundness of judgment and 
truth, which opinion is accepted by the larger number of 
people, and thereby ultimately becomes the basis of public 
policy for the State. What is the final result and where are 
we as regards the prevalence and endurance of Truth? 
Journalistic "^^ addition to all these dangerous influences. 
Form. Yve must consider the third specific character- 



130 Critical Examination of 

istic of modern journalism, i.e. the need for striking, 
emphatic and exaggerated diction, which has developed 
our journalese style and on which I have dwelt before. 
This again is bound — or is, at least, likely — to influence 
your original judgment consciously or unconsciously. As 
a class, you journalists have every temptation and in- 
ducement to be sensational, at times, even hysterical. 
You are the last people in whom I should seek for safe, well- 
balanced and sober judgment. Many of you, the best of you, 
will, by a great moral effort, endeavour to suppress and 
counteract this evil tendency of your profession; and, if not 
always, you may do it at times. But it is hard to break away 
from a mental habit. 

"The conclusion at which we are forced to 

Summary of arrive is: that modern journalism acts in a 

Results of ■* 

Journalism most demoralising manner on the mentality 

on Truth. ^£ ^j^^ modern world. By the essential con- 

stitution, as well as the immediate objects and ultimate 
aims, of the modern newspaper itself, and by the training 
and professional practice of even the most high-minded 
journalists, the cause of Truth is far from being furthered; 
it is in fact injured in its most vital functions and purpose, 
and Truth, as we have maintained before, is, in its relation 
to the life of a community and to the world at large, not only 
a theoretical luxury but a practical necessity upon which the 
whole well-being of the community depends, even in the 
most material functions of daily life. Finally, on the negative 
side, through the encouragement which is given to prepare 
the mental food for the public in a condensed and highly 
seasoned form, there has been created a habit and craving 
for such a condensation and preparation of its mental diet, 
so that the public mind turns from, healthy and simple fare 



this Ideal of Journalism 131 

and refuses altogether the nourishment which sustains the 
truth-providing organs. The world suffers from moral 
dyspepsia. It is chiefly owing to the journalist, who, as I 
said before, monopolises most of the leisure which the public 
devote to reading, that people will no longer read books, 
which in most cases are the only avenues to sound and 
beneficent education and to the realisation of Truth. It is 
also owing to this influence that, when people do read, from 
the habit of rushing through newspapers, accelerated by the 
milestones of headlines, they no longer read these books 
leisurely, carefully and thoroughly, the only method leading 
to complete, useful and improving understanding. The 
journalist, more than any other class of men, has helped to 
lower and vitiate the sense of Truth." 



CHAPTER IX. 

"RECONSTRUCTION" OF JOURNALISM 
BY THE STATE 

If this is the great evil, what practical and effective remedy 
can be provided to cure it? Though I am fully aware of the 
discouraging fact that the mere exposition, and even the 
acceptance, of reforms undeniably desirable in themselves 
are not enough to counteract the powerfully established 
traditions that hold our public life in their grip by so many 
tentacles, I venture to suggest in a constructive spirit the 
means which may overcome this most powerful danger to 
the establishment of Truth and its diffusion into public life — 
in the first place the action which it is possible for the State 
and public bodies to take, and in the second place, the 
intrinsic reform of modern journalism as well as the means 
of publicity in the various forms which the printing press has 
put at our disposal. 

We must first consider the desirability and the 
f.f/Jl'^^^' possibihty of the interference of the State and 

of public bodies to guard Truth in the interest 
of the public. Here we at once meet with the strong, and in 
itself, justified, objection against any interference with the 
Freedom of the Press. The recognition of this great principle 
in public life is one of the most signal achievements of the 
nineteenth century, and must be jealously guarded at all 
costs. It was writ large on the banner of Liberalism through- 
out all the struggles for freedom in the various enthusiastic 
movements of the past century. It was often the centre 
and forefront of the struggles for emancipation from the 



* * Reconstruction ' ' of Journalism 133 

trammels of tyranny and feudalism. In spite of the victory 
of Liberalism in most parts of the civilised world, some of 
the leading countries of Europe are still enslaved by auto- 
cracy, and Germany, which took so active and potent a part 
in the Liberal Revival and Period of Enlightenment during 
the Napoleonic era and in the Revolution of 1848 (and 
which in some spheres of intellectual life occupies the first 
rank), must emphatically be classed as reactionary in spirit. 
As regards the Press, there is no more representative in- 
stance of this reactionary spirit than the Press Bureau of 
Berlin backed by the Reptilienfond from which it draws its 
powerful material sustenance. In the interests of Truth, no 
more damning instance could be adduced against State- 
interference than the working of this Press Bureau. The 
natural answer to this objection, of course, is that Germany 
has a purely autocratic, or at least, a bureaucratic and 
militaristic government, and that the same objections do 
not hold in truly democratic countries. We, who happily 
enjoy the blessings of a democratic regime, have however 
realised from our own experience what such interference 
might mean even in the working of the Censorship among 
us, an undoubted military necessity during the prosecution 
of this war. It has brought home to us, confirmed and in- 
tensified, our mistrust of Red Tape and of the unintelli- 
gence which seems to go with the security of bureaucratic 
authority. The imminence and acuteness of our personal 
experiences help to bring home vividly the unintelligence 
of the official bureaucratic mind and serve as a warning 
against State-interference in matters of moral, intellectual 
and artistic interest. Whenever there is a question of thus 
invoking the help of the State, there is at once an outcry of 
"Save us in all matters of the mind from official intelli- 



134 " Reconstruction " of 

gence ! " This is felt strongly by high-minded and competent 
educational reformers and by advocates of university reform, 
and in general by all those concerned in educational matters ; 
though they must not forget that the most drastic and 
beneficent reforms at the end of the seventies of the last 
century were carried out with the sanction and under the 
authority of the State. 

Besides this danger, inherent in bureaucratic organisation 
and in the nature of the bureaucratic mind, we who enjoj^ 
the blessings of a democratic government must remember 
that its freedom is modified by the abuses of party govern- 
ment. Thus the administration of the day is bound, or at 
least, is likely to influence the working of any such depart- 
ment by the interests or the prejudices and fixed opinions of 
the party in power. Here again we meet with a grave 
objection to State influence interfering with the absolute 
Freedom of the Press. Moreover it may be urged that, 
through the enactment of copious and elaborate laws against 
slander and libel, the State has already done its share and 
has protected the pubhc from offences against Truth in 
the Press. 

Powerful and worthy of attention as all these objections 
may be, they do not render a thorough and unbiassed con- 
sideration of this important problem superfluous. We in no 
way advocate the establishment of a Press Bureau in degree 
or in kind similar to that of Germany. Official and semi- 
official communications can and will be made, the difference 
only being that they will be more numerous, taking the 
public more into the confidence of the administration and 
thereby in turn training the pubhc in its power of appre- 
hending and of judging important matters of State. Nor 
will the instrument through which the State thus takes 



Journalism by the State 135 

direct cognisance of the Press in the pubHc interest (a State, 
moreover, systematically and directly under the control of 
the public in its very constitution) be subject to bureau- 
cratic formalism or unintelligence or in any way come within 
the influence of party government. 

What the modern Democracy — which means the modern 
State — must reahse is, first, that Freedom of the Press does 
not mean Privilege to disseminate Untruth, as little as per- 
sonal liberty implies freedom to steal or to murder. In the 
second place, we must remember that the newspaper in its 
modern position as the principal high road to the knowledge 
of public events, is in some form a monopoly, on account of 
this essential attribute of publicity. It is the means of 
arriving at true information, as much as roads or sign-posts 
are the means of public transportation and direction, as the 
postal and telegraphic services are means of public com- 
munication. In one sense it is even more puhlic in character ; 
for, where letters and telegrams convey private information 
between individuals, the newspaper transmits public infor- 
mation to the public at large. The State must reahse its 
duty to guard Truth in the interest of the pubhc as it now 
guards the safety of the roads and communications, the 
education of the young, as well as life and property. 

At present the State cannot directly ensure Truth except 
through its educational institutions: but it can directly 
guard the public against untruth. It does this to a certain 
degree by its laws against slander and hbel as regards the 
individual. But the important point to be realised, is that, 
so far from granting exceptional privileges to the Press in the 
freedom of statement and the spreading of reports, it ought 
still further and more drastically to guard and to protect the 
individual and the public against the dangers of untruth, in 



136 "Reconstruction" of 

consideration of the fact that the potency and facility of 
diffusing facts and opinions and of ensuring pubHcity, in- 
herent in the Press, constitute, as it were, a monopoly of the 
same nature as are the construction of public roads, and the 
postal and telegraphic services for purposes of communica- 
tion. The very granting of such legal privileges tp some 
extent constitutes the establishment of a monopoly. In any 
case, however, it must be recognised that, harmful as the 
invention and spreading of untrue statements by an indi- 
vidual within the circle of his own influence may be, the 
publication of inaccurate or untrue statements through the 
one vehicle, the direct aim and purpose of which is such 
publication and the widest diffusion among the whole popu- 
lation, is against "public policy" and must therefore be pre- 
vented by the State in protection of its national life. 

Now this can be done, first, by the reform of the Press- 
laws and the modification of "privilege" with regard to 
libel, and, in the second place, by the establishment of an 
independent department, judicial as well as administrative, 
to carry these laws into effect. But we may even go a bold 
step forward and advocate the assumption of the function of 
distributing truthful information by the State and, in the 
future, by the administration of the League of Nations or the 
International Court backed by Power. 

No doubt the laws of libel and slander (whicii we have 
discussed above, see pp. 80 seq.) are contrived to protect the 
individual and the public against defamatory statements. 
They are designed emphatically to check all words and deeds 
manifestly arising out of the motive of hatred and malice. 
No privilege granted to individuals, or newspapers protecting 
them, against penalty for true or untrue statements made by 
them holds, if "malice" can be proved. It will, however. 



Journalism by the State 137 

readily be perceived how difficult it is to prove "malice" as 
a motive in a Court of Law. Any defamatory statement 
which "exposes a person to hatred, ridicule or contempt or 
which causes him to be shunned or avoided or which has a 
tendency to injure him in his office, profession or trade is 
slanderous or libellous." However, unless these conditions 
are fulfilled, the mere statement of an untruth is not libellous 
unless "malice" can be proved. Now, I maintain em- 
phatically, that an essential difference ought to be estab- 
lished between the legal meaning of "publication" in news- 
papers and in less public channels of communication. For in 
the first place, the designed and deliberate publication of facts 
defamatory, injurious, or even merely causing annoyance, 
always implies malice in the act. The practice of English law 
confirms this view in the very difference established between 
libel and slander; for (as we have seen before) the former 
is the more serious offence because the written or printed 
statement is of itself recognised as a graver offence than the 
spoken word. An individual may inadvertently or in a 
momentary fit of temper speak or write words thus de- 
famatory; but this does not necessarily prove deliberate 
malice. On the other hand, deliberately to write, to cause 
to be set up in type, to correct and then hand over to the 
machinery of the widest instrument of publication, (as last- 
ing as is the life of paper and print,) apart from any serious 
injury, and even if it only be disagreeable to the victim, does 
imply malice — ^which means the desire to harm. In the 
second place, unless "special damage " or the other injurious 
results mentioned above result, a statement is not slanderous 
or libellous even if it can be proved to be untrue. But as we 
have seen, an essential difference ought to be established 
between the legal meaning of "publication" in newspapers 



138 " Reconstruction " of 

and in the other methods of private communication. They 
are the privileged vehicle of truthful information and par- 
take of the nature of a monopoly. Their function, like that 
of a railway which controls traffic, is diverted and vitiated 
when untruths are conveyed, and in that case the privilege 
ought to be withdrawn. The spreading of lies is a damage 
to the public. Apart from "special damage" to 2My indi- 
vidual, there is damage to the public. Even if it be a trivial 
or "innocent" lie, it becomes a "public nuisance" as un- 
healthy^ and disagreeable smells or distressing noises are 
recognised as such. Misleading the public, even without any 
"special damage," is, finally, injurious to the moral health 
of the public, as smells and noises may be detrimental to 
physical health. 

The Press-laws ought therefore to be modified, not only 
to include direct punishment for the spreading by the news- 
paper of untrue statements of whatever nature — but also 
to provide for the adequate and immediate correction of 
such statements. The newspapers ought to be bound, with 
the least possible delay, to publish apologies and retractions 
upon being notified of misstatements. These apologies and 
retractions ought to be published at once so as to make them 
as effective as possible, and any delay ought to constitute an 
aggravation of the offence should further legal proceedings 
follow. Furthermore, they ought to be made practically in 
the same form and in the same part of the newspaper where 
the untrue statement was originally made. The justice of 
this condition will be manifest. For it is often the practice 
of newspapers to make the misstatement in a conspicuous 
form, perhaps on the most important page containing foreign 
news and telegrams, and to relegate their apology or cor- 
rection to an inconspicuous column or corner, in the smallest 



Journalism by the State 139 

print. Every paper, moreover, might establish, within 
reasonable possibilities for the adjustment of their limited 
space, some portion of each issue for corrections of its state- 
ments, clear and concise, which are not defamatory, but 
which will, by the pubHcation of such corrections, further 
the transmission of Truth and, at all events, guard against 
the diffusion and confirmation of Untruth. 

Tl^e insurance of these ends, more important and more 
urgent in their necessity than many material reforms now 
admitted by the public and the Government, would no doubt 
open the doors to a vast amount of business and of work with 
which our over-loaded Courts of Law could not be expected 
to deal, even if they were the proper administrators of such 
law. It would therefore require the establishment of a 
special Press Arbitration Court, beyond all influence oi party 
administration, half administrative and half legal, yet wholly 
judicial in spirit, in which the interests of the community in 
the transportation and communication of the most impor- 
tant and vital moral goods should be guarded. 

Now I venture to go still further and to suggest far more 
extensive, direct and active intervention on the part of the 
State in matters journalistic. This will no doubt meet with 
much opposition supported by cogent arguments from many 
points of view. The chief objection will come from those who 
do not consider matters spiritual, intellectual and moral to 
be suitable to direct action on the part of the State. 

This question supplies us with reasons for my chief im- 
peachment, — not only of reactionary Conservatism, Capi- 
talism and all those who are directly bent merely upon pre- 
serving privilege, whether conferred by birth or by money, 
but also of the Sociahst and Labour parties, — that they have 
all raised the economic factor in private and public life to a 
w. T. 9 



140 " Reconstruction " of 

height of all-predominating importance and have not 
properly co-ordinated it in the general sociological system, 
in which, whatever its importance, it must be subordinated 
to wider, as well as more fundamental, moral and social aims 
and ideals. No doubt the professional economists and 
economic writers for the last hundred years and more are 
responsible for this distortion of facts. The misleading 
•arrogation of social welfare in the implied connotation of 
the terms "Socialism " or "socialistic," as covering the whole 
of hmnan life and the interests of civilised society, corre- 
sponds to the same truth-distorting abuse of the term "in- 
ternational" by the Marxian sociaHsts, with whom it merely 
refers to class-antagonism and the final dominance of one 
class and one group of human occupations over the rest. 
Thus the modern cry for "nationalisation" of transporta- 
tion, of railways, of mines, of the provision for all the 
economic necessities of life — in fact of all industry — has 
entirely ignored the most important and natural factor in 
national education, namely, the transportation of truthful 
information and news. From the nature of things, this is 
the department in which " nationahsation " should first be 
called for and carried into effect and is, moreover, a depart- 
ment in which it can easily be realised. 

There, no doubt, now exists an Of&cial Gazette with us as 
in most other countries. But the information conveyed is 
generally confined to announcements concerning the mere 
machinery of government on the more personal side. In 
many countries there exists an official Press and in most 
countries statements are conveyed throughout the whole 
Press more or less clearly indicated as "official," "semi- 
official" or "inspired." But what, in the first instance, is 
most urgently called for is that such sources of official in- 
formation should be clearly and unequivocally stated and 



Journalism by the State 141 

impressed upon the reading public and that such informa- 
tion should cover the whole of foreign as well as of domestic 
politics, enactments and administrative action and policy. 
No doubt there now exists the useful custom of "questions 
and answers in the House." But this source of information 
is fortuitous and — from the nature of party government and 
procedure — biassed in origin and statement. It ought to 
become one of the most important official functions and 
practices of each administration thus to inform, as well as 
to educate, the general public in matters of State and, above 
all, to ensure truth and the resultant faith in the public mind. 
Such a practice would be far from making a new departure 
in public life. The Herald and the Town Crier and the 
"proclamations" posted conspicuously on the Town Hall 
or the village church were, from the remotest antiquity, the 
means of making public announcements by the local or 
central authorities. With the growth and development of 
pohtical life, of democracy, of the direct participation of the 
larger population in self-government, as well as the vast 
increase of public business, of the interrelation and inter- 
penetration of public and private life and interests, the need 
for public information has grown infinitely greater than it 
was in the days when the King's Herald or the Town Crier 
sufficed to keep the people informed of the facts which it 
was thought needful for them to know by those who ruled 
them. The accurate imparting of matters of essential con- 
cern to a democratic people should not be left to chance, to 
the personal bias or personal and party interests of those who 
have chosen the lucrative business of producing newspapers. 
By all our experience of the past and the immediate present, 
the further extension, the systematic official development of 
this most important function of State is urgently called for. 

9—2 



142 " Reconstruction " of 

We next come to the important subject of Advertisement, 
which plays so predominant a part in the history of Jour- 
naHsm and in the whole of modern economic and social life. 
We need not be very old to remember the comparatively 
small sheets issued, generally under the local name of "Ad- 
vertiser," consisting wholly of advertisements without 
journalistic news or comment. Out of this sheet, in many 
cases, by organic stages of commercial and journalistic 
evolution, some of the most important and prominent news- 
papers have grown. These sheets responded to a real need in 
the community, namely, the giving of information — generally 
local — of commercial, and economic as well as social im- 
portance to the community. It marked the step from private 
to public interest — of the same character and to the same 
degree as the transmission of letters and telegrams among 
individuals and pubhc bodies — nay, to a greater degree in 
so far as the communication is professedly and actually made 
to the public as such. Now I maintain that this function is 
essentially one implied by, and inherent in, the very nature 
of democratic government. 

If this be so from the very nature of Advertisement 
and its essential function, it becomes confirmed and stiU 
more urgently desirable when we realise its more indirect 
influence on journalism in commerce and general intercourse 
as well as its effect upon the moral, and even physical, health 
of the whole population in modern times. It will be at once 
admitted, by all conversant with the management and busi- 
ness of the modern newspaper, that the department of adver- 
tising plays an important, if not a dominating, part in the 
actual working — the production as well as the distribution — 
of the paper. Without advertisements most modern news- 
papers could not be issued at all in their present form. It is 



Journalism by the State 143 

ultimately this one element which gives them their inordi- 
nate power, out of all proportion to the moral, intellectual 
and pohtical claims of those who are responsible for its 
writing and production. Is it for the public good that this 
power should be vested in them? Ought it not to be in the 
hands of the public itself through the representative govern- 
ment which it has chosen? Moreover, as I have suggested 
before (see p. 108), the direct influence of those who furnish 
the newspapers with, or who control, the advertisements 
themselves, m?y be great and may be used for private pur- 
poses far removed from the public interest. Finall} , the 
announcements thus made direct to the public (and, as we 
have seen, in so far "privileged" and forming a monopoly) 
may be immoral and unsocial and "against good policy." 
Though positive indecency and immorality are forbidden by 
law, it is practically impossible to control all publications 
which, insidiously and by clever subterfuges, do convey such 
reprehensible information, nor can the less open suggestions 
which lead to demoralisation form the subject of a direct 
prosecution. 

On every ground it is therefore desirable and urgent that 
the State should directly take charge of this department of 
pubhc information. The "precedent " tradition is admitted, 
inasmuch as the State already exacts a tax on advertise- 
ments. Here will be found a very important and equitable 
source of pubnc revenue (local, central, or both)' more lucra- 
tive and more justified, on the ground of direct pubhcity, 
than are Post and Telegraph. But this "nationalisation" of 
the definite function of advertisement can and ought to be 
extended beyond the newspaper to all forms of advertise- 
ment, i.e. to every kind of pubhc announcements, which 
have in modern times developed to such a degree that they 



144 " Reconstruction " of 

have degenerated into public nuisances. The extensive ob- 
trusion on the pubhc of private concerns all over the country 
and in every variety of form — the hypertrophy of modern 
advertisement — has assumed proportions and definite forms 
which, so far from being in the public interest, have become 
a serious evil and nuisance. Enough has already been said 
and written on disfigurement of scenery and other abuses to 
which the advertising practice has given rise, to the evils of 
leading the public to use medicines detrimental to health, 
besides the more directly immoral or harmful commercial 
interests which are thus unduly obtruded and favoured by 
public announcements. Whoever has walked through the 
streets of many a town, more especially in America, must 
have had his nerves shattered, not only by the Babel of 
sounds and noises, but by the bewildering forms of illumin- 
ated and revolving announcements by means of which the 
advertiser literally /orc^s even the most reluctant and peace- 
ful citizen to take note of his often useless or fraudulent 
incitements to purchase his wares. Police regulations pro- 
tect us against evil smells and the harmless street-organ can 
be prevented from disturbing the repose of a given district. 
Surely we have a right to claim protection from sight- 
stenches and sound-stenches as well as from noxious gases ^. 
The necessary result of this whole system of advertisement, 
less direct, though equally opposed to the well-being of the 
public, is the increase of neurasthenia among the people of 
our own days, because the State does not perform a duty 
which lies within its real province and leaves it to the 
cupidity of individuals, who, moreover, do not perform the 
important function of conveying truthful information to the 

1 I am informed that one Government department specially forbids 
in its leases the use of such flashing illuminations for advertisements. 



Journalism by the State 145 

public and of directing it into the channels which benefit 
instead of injuring public health, both physical and moral. 
Let no one object that the estabhshment of such public 
departments will encourage bureaucratic tyranny and will 
not attain the desired ends. Such objections spell the im- 
peachment of democracy and the glorification of autocracy. 
The democracy can and must control its own officials and 
remove those who are corrupt or inefficient — or go under^. 

^ Mr Sydney Brooks, an experienced authority on matters journal- 
istic, has kindly read the manuscript of this book with a view to 
making suggestions and corrections. He advises me to carry my 
study of the subject still further and to enter upon the historical con- 
sideration of the whole question of Publicity. Such an expose would 
be out of place here; but an exhaustive monograph on PubHcity is 
urgently called for. In an illuminating letter, following upon a con- 
versation we had after he had read this book, he made these most 
suggestive comments on the wider question : 

"The problem of JournaUsm in its relation to the State and the 
individual citizen and international affairs and even Ufe in general is 
only part of the bigger problem of pubhcity. No one that I know of 
has yet attempted to work out the action and reaction of the new and 
tremendous power of pubhcity upon the scheme of things. Probably 
we are still too near to the eruption of this strange force that has 
burst upon the world to be able to assess its significance or formulate 
its relations to life and government and society. A generation still 
lives which saw the birth of Journahsm in its present form. It is the 
product of a quick succession of astonishing inventions. The rail- 
road, the cable, the telegraph, the telephone, the rotary press, the 
linotype, the manufacture of paper from wood-pulp, these are the 
discoveries of yesterday that have made possible the journal of to-day. 

" But already the Press seems to have taken its place among the 
permanent social forces. We see it visibly affecting pretty nearly all 
we do and say and think, competing with the churches, almost super- 
seding Parliaments, elbowing out literature, rivalling the schools and 
universities, above all furnishing the world with a new set of nerves. 
What seems to me to mark out our age from all others is precisely 
this ubiquitous phenomenon of pubhcity. The ancient world had 
rehgion, art, law, commerce, and war. And it also had in the old 
City-States pubhcity on an intense but of course very local scale. 



146 



" Reconstmction " of 



International So far from being deterred from urging this 
Control. thoroughly practical reform in public life and 

even State intervention, by the inevitable objection on the 
ground of "practicability" or the condescending and con- 
But Journalism, the reading habit, the penetration of the printed 
word — these are pecuharly modern accessories. The whole world of 
to-day lives in a glass house with all the electric lights turned on and 
a reporter at each key-hole and staring through every pane ; and it is 
odd that nobody has yet tried to trace out the consequences of this 
new and pervasive force, to define its nature and functions, and to 
establish its place and prerogatives by the side of those other in- 
fluences that were equally operative in the past as in the present. 

"All industrial problems, and the whole spirit in which industry is 
conducted, are profoundly affected by the fact that nowadays the 
workers know, or at any rate hear of, read about and discuss things 
that their grandfathers were either altogether ignorant of or accepted 
uninquiringly as part of the ordained order. Similarly the flounder- 
ings of the British Government in its efforts to gauge or influence 
opinion at home and abroad are due at bottom to a failure to adjust 
the official mind to this formidable force of publicity." 

I have always held that, from the Herald of olden days, the Towii 
Crier and the notices exhibited in public places, publicity concerning 
affairs and matters of State has passed through thrjee main phases: 
( I ) the public meetings of citizens in such City-States as Athens and 
repubhcan Rome and the speeches there made by the orators and 
political leaders; (2) parliamentary debates, when representative 
government was estabhshed in modern times, in which the discussion 
by the members was meant to convince and to aflect the decision 
of the political representatives of the people. There can be no doubt 
that this effect was produced in earher days by actual debate; while, 
with the development of stereotyped party organisation and govern- 
ment, debate has actually lost most of its effectiveness in directing 
opinion or voting; (3) the transmission of facts and arguments con- 
cerning political affairs through the Press to instruct and influence 
the electors themselves. 

In the first stage, owing to the comparative restrictions of space 
and numbers of inhabitants, the orator could directly influence the 
voters with whom the decision rested. This no doubt presented great 
advantages, though it gave too much power to oratory itself, often 
led to the victory of the demagogue over the statesman and patriot 



Journalism by the State 147 

temptuous sneer of the worshipper of estabHshed formahsm, 
I even venture to go further and to express the hope (already 
suggested on p. 136) that some day in a future not too remote, 

and was, in its emotional effectiveness, likely to arouse popular 
passion and to lead to hasty decisions. 

In the parHamentary period some of the evils resulting from the 
influence of mere oratory still made themselves felt; but, with the 
growth of party government, the electors not forming an assembly 
directly producing or modifying the laws, the machinery for furnish- 
ing the means of instructing the voter on both sides of the question 
has grown perfunctory. 

With the imperfections of the Press in this respect I have dealt in 
the text, especially in so far as it is a party-press. The evils are not 
so much to be found in what is reported and said as in what is not 
reported and left unsaid. 

The problem and its solution become the more comphcated and the 
more urgent the greater the extent in space and in the numbers and 
variety of the population in States hke the British Empire. The more 
democratic the country and with the constant enlargement of the 
franchise, the greater grows the need for the truthful and effective 
instruction of the voters concerning the facts and arguments with 
which they have to deal in the interest of the whole people. There 
can be no doubt that the Referendum, already actually in use in such 
countries as Switzerland, will ultimately have to be introduced into 
all democratic countries, when it concerns decisions on definite 
questions of vital national importance. This, of itself, pre-supposes 
or pre-demands that the State itself should take charge of pubUcity 
as affecting popular decisions. 

There have been isolated anticipations, under our present em- 
bryonic — or rather chaotic — practice of pubhcity. So in France, by 
decree of the State, notable speeches by statesmen on important 
issues, have by pubHc enactment been printed and posted throughout 
the country in order to reach as far as possible the whole population. 
In a lesser degree the occasional pubhcation of discussions by those 
qualified in the "Letters to The Times" (one of the characteristic 
and undying achievements of that paper) has pointed in the same 
direction. Difficult as the problem undoubtedly is, the regulation of 
Pubhcity by the State is one of the necessary consequences of demo- 
cratic government and will have to be faced and solved in the near 
future. 



148 "Reconstruction'' of 

it will be possible to extend the effective insurance of Truth 
beyond the internal government of each nation into the 
wider sphere of internationality, and that there will be an 
International Bureau, organised by the League of Nations, 
or, as I still venture to hope, by the "International Court 
backed by Power," in which "foreign" transgressions of 
Truth in journalistic publication will be dealt with and 
rectified. That this is not the unpractical and Utopian 
dream of a visionary, I can prove from having been per- 
sonally concerned, some twelve years ago, in the establish- 
ment of a great international news-agency, which was on 
the eve of actual realisation, the object and aim of which 
was the insurance of Truth in the transmission of inter- 
national news. This important and practical scheme (such 
it has since been called by one of the most eminent and 
successful business men of America, controlling the interests 
of vast telephone and telegraph companies) was designed as 
a pure business concern, with a capital of £1,000,000, and 
was supported by practical business men of wealth and 
prominence in various parts of the world, who realised that 
the introduction of the moral element which made for truth, 
constituted the most valuable business asset in the whole 
scheme. The story of "this enterprise that failed," partly 
through the more or less accidental mismanagement and 
partly through certain characteristics in the personality of 
one man who had the making or undoing of it in his hands, is 
of such great public interest, that I propose to make it fully 
known to the world at an early opportunity. While refusing 
to have any responsibility in, or to be in any way directly 
concerned with, the financial and business side of this great 
enterprise, I undertook at the time to be the head of the 
"moral" side. This "moral" department, to which was 



Journalism by the State 149 

ensured final control and direction of the business side, had 
already succeeded in forming national committees in each of 
the principal countries of the civilised world, composed of the 
most eminent and honourable men of every class, who were 
to act as a court of direction and appeal to ensure Truth in 
the transmission of all news and articles issued by this inter- 
national agency. In addition, there was to be established a 
final Court of Appeal, at The Hague, consisting of delegates 
from the various national committees meeting there for a 
definite period in every year, to v/hich appeals from the 
decisions of the national committees could be referred for 
final rectification, as also all complaints and differences 
arising between the business management and the moral 
committees of control. Had this great scheme been realised 
in working efficiency for some years before the advent of 
this war, I do not claim that it could at once have effectu- 
ally prevented the outburst; but I am justified in beheving 
that the information and education of the public all over 
the world might have contributed greatly, if not to the 
relinquishment of the set policy of any one country, at least 
to the full comprehension of that policy by the peoples of all 
the other countries. Perhaps, even more than in the home 
life within each nation — great as is the need there also of 
preventing the wilful diffusion of untruths — the almost 
grotesque manufacture of lies through the agency of the 
Press in every country^, in order to produce estrangement 

^ A striking illustration is furnished from my own personal 
experience. In 1897, at the close of the Graeco-Turkish war an 
article appeared in the Gegenwart of Berlin (one of the most trust- 
worthy and respectable weekly papers in Germany) on the origin of 
that war. It contained a series of signed letters by men eminent in 
science and learning in that country, evidently founded upon, or 
inspired by, information received from the German Foreign OfiSce, 



150 * * Reconstruction ' ' of Journalism 

and animosity between the several nations in the inter- 
national world, will have at all costs to be counteracted and 
the immediate crying necessity of upholding the cause of 
Truth among the several nations will be felt. This need 
will be felt so urgently, that the beginnings of the great re- 
form may come from the wider international body at once, 
and thence penetrate downwards into all the paths and by- 
ways of our internal national life. 

and showing how, even at that period, popular opinion as directed — 
or rather wilfully misled — by the German Government was preparing 
the mentality which has led to the present world catastrophe. The 
object was to produce or aggravate mistrust and hatred among the 
German people against England. The contribution of the famous 
philosopher, the late Eduard v. Hartmann, maintained the absurd 
contention that England was directly responsible for that war, as it 
was also for the Armenian massacres, having incited the Greeks as 
well as the Armenians to take up arms in order perfidiously to 
further her own political interests. As I happened to be well ac- 
quainted with the official attitude of the British Government towards 
Greece, and possessing irrefutable evidence that every step was taken 
by England to prevent Greece from taking up arms, I wrote a reply 
to Eduard v. Hartmann with an urgent request to the editor that, 
in the interest of truth — if for no other reason — my reply should be 
pubHshed in the Gegenwart. In spite of the support of many eminent 
and influential people in Germany it was impossible to secure pubU- 
cation either in the Gegenwart or in any other German paper. 



CHAPTER X. 

"RECONSTRUCTION" OF JOURNALISM 
FROM WITHIN 

If the State, through the modification of its laws and through 
the dstabHshment of an administrative machinery which 
should control journalistic work, in order to prevent the 
spread of untruths, may contribute to this ''consummation 
devoutly to be wished," the most important reform will still 
be the complete revision of journalism from within, in the 
proper and true adjustment of the journalist's profession and 
career and the direction of journalistic activity of the news- 
papers themselves. 

We have seen that the influence of the modern journalist, 
though he has an ideal conception of his training and pro- 
fession, is unfavourable to the maintenance and refinement of 
Truth through the development which the modern newspaper 
has undergone. The newspaper must return to its original 
purpose and destination of a news' paper. In the training of 
the journalist to fulfil these aims, there remains a wide and 
important sphere to work upon. The "lightning reckoner/' 
who forms opinions and judgments with lightning speed, 
must go. There will still be room for thorough and con- 
scientious training, even if we do not admit the actual 
necessity or utility of definite Schools of Journalism. The 
management of a newspaper requires, not only inborn 
talent, but continuous work, the training and experience of 
a lifetime. It is a profession or trade in itself as complicated 
as any other one of our great professions. From the mastery 
of the technique and business of printing to the due disposal 



152 "Reconstruction'' of 

of the space available in each number of the paper, with a 
view, not only to its distribution and regulation, but to a 
fixed system determined by the division of subjects which 
the reader requires to find in their proper places, and, above 
all, to the due proportion in the distribution of such in- 
formation and news in consideration of the intrinsic nature 
and importance of each item ; in the department of advertise- 
ment, the financing of the paper, etc., etc. — the grasp and 
mastery of all these several requisites and demands which go 
to the production of a successful newspaper will tax the 
capacity, the industry, experience and judgment of the ablest 
men within a community, quite apart from their prestidigi- 
tator tricks of rapid, and in so far misleading, judgments of 
the actual affairs of the world of life and thought. 

If the journalist himself thus returns to his 
The News ^j.^^ ^^^ nobly important function, the news- 
paper itself must become the purveyor of all 
important news and information with the greatest rapidity 
and accuracy. This, in all conscience, is a task of sufficient 
importance and dif&culty. It will also become, as heretofore, 
the means of distributing official information given by the 
State and all its departments, such information growing in 
frequency and fulness with the growth of the truly demo- 
cratic spirit among the citizens of a country, together with 
the advancement of their political education and the realisa- 
tion of their political responsibilities. But the opinions and 
judgment of proprietors, editors, foreign correspondents and 
leader-writers, given in lightning succession day by day, are 
to be expunged from the sheets of the daily press. The 
functions of the editorial staff and the leader-writers must 
be limited to explanatorj^ comment in order to increase the 
intrinsic understanding of the news conveyed — comments of 



Journalism from Within 153 

a geographical, political, economical, statistical and ethno- 
graphical nature. 

One important result of this curtailment of journalistic 
activity, the material and practical consequences of which 
will be far from negligible, will be a great diminution in the 
bulk of the daily newspaper and of the reading-matter 
forced upon the public in these days of rapid intercommuni- 
cation, of which we have heard so much, and the recognition 
of which has led to such harmful developments of journalism. 
We may even hope that, with the introduction of some in- 
vention in the mechanical printing and folding of paper, the 
inconvenient folio size of our daily papers may be reduced to 
more manageable and convenient proportions. I venture to 
express the opinion — not the result of one day's thought 
and experience — that a newspaper, which was backed by 
sufficient talent and capital and boldly set out to limit itself 
to the publication of really important news without personal 
comment, presented in the most effective manner, and 
adopting the more convenient quarto or even octavo form, 
would prove a great financial success for the experienced 
newspaper-man who would undertake such an enterprise 
on a large scale. 

As for the formation of opinion and judgment on such 
news and matters of public concern, on which the wider 
public requires further instruction and guidance, I have 
already referred above to the work of the publicist, 
economist, sociologist and other students as well as men 
interested in public affairs, who have prepared themselves 
by training and experience to form such opinions, the ex- 
pression of which is not only right and useful, but is for 
them a duty. My contention, and my condemnation of one- 
sided journalistic activity, are entirely concerned with the 



154 " Reconstruction ' ' of 

element of rapidity and haste in the formation of judgment 
and with the consequent conception which the journahst 
has of his career as fitting him for the expression of such 
opinion within the shortest time on all matters that concern 
the public. The editorial "we" should be abohshed. In its 
place the expression of opinion and judgment must be 
clearly presented to the public over the signature of the 
writer, so that the public can gauge the prima facie qualifi- 
cations and authority inherent in the opinion expressed — in 
fact the question whether such an authority has the right to 
an opinion on such matters at all. 

For the pubHcation of opinions there remain 
Penodtcal ^^^ weekly newspapers, including the bulky 

weekly editions of the daily papers as deve- 
loped more especially in the United States, which inci- 
dentall}^ convey so much useful general information, the 
more useful when it emanates from distinguished authorities 
in the various intellectual spheres, whose signatures are af- 
fixed to their articles. There further exist the monthly and 
quarterly reviews and magazines for this definite purpose. 
All these again increase their utihty and further the ultimate 
objects of Truth the more the articles show the definite 
authorities from whom they emanate. 

Finally, however, there remains a most im- 
^nTBooks poi'tant domain, in the pubHcation of mature 

and dehberate thought on matters that vitally 
concern public welfare, which cannot be condensed and 
cramped into the shorter compass of periodic pubHcation. 
It is eminently untrue that whatever is worth saying can be 
said in a few words. Aristotle's condensed statement of the 
essential principle of all art, as being concerned with the 
"harmony between form and matter" (in spite of its own 



Journalism from Within 155 

shortness), conveys one of the deepest truths. Now, some 
"matter" can "harmonise" with a shorter form of exposi- 
tion, other subjects essentially require a longer form. The 
weightier matter requiring the fullest and most thorough 
treatment demands the book-form. On the other hand, some 
important information, generally concerned with one definite 
topic or condition of affairs, is also often not suited to a 
longer monograph or book. Moreover, the manufacture of 
a book requires comparatively much time; while the ex- 
pression of such opinions as I have in view, though in no 
way calling for haste, still requires for its effectiveness 
the most rapid publication. There remains therefore one 
form of publication, widely prevalent in former days, the 
return of which I wish to advocate — i.e. the signed pam- 
phlet. It must be admitted that this is the best form in 
which opinions and judgments can be adequately expressed 
by those qualified to hold them. The great difficulty remains 
in our days the adequate means of distribution. In excep- 
tional cases, such as some of Mr Gladstone's pamphlets, the 
burning interest taken by the public in the questions them- 
selves and the exceptional popularity and eminence of the 
author ensured their widest diffusion. Here again I venture 
— I hope not presumptuously — to make a suggestion of the 
practical nature of which I have no doubt. If a thorough^ 
qualified firm of pubhshers would make it recognisedly its 
main business to publish such pamphlets, perhaps even 
adding all the lucrative accessories of the advertising busi- 
ness (hateful and inconvenient as many of us find them, 
because they inflate the books and magazines), I have little 
doubt of ultimate success on the business side, as I have still 
less doubt that the revival of such a tradition would act most 
beneficially in diffusing among the public various opinions 
w. T. 10 



156" Reconstruction " of Journalism from Within 

and judgments on public matters which will ultimately 
establish Truth, instead of the misleading and demoralising 
vehicle of our own days — the anonymous daily paper. 

Finally I must recur to another point, to 
Atrophy of which I have referred on several occasions 
Reading. before, i.e. the atrophy of the faculty of sus- 
tained and thorough reading of books. Be- 
sides all the dangers and evils arising out of the monopoly 
of modern journalism, upon which we have been dwelling, 
including the absorption of leisure for reading among the 
wider public, one of the most disastrous and lasting ultimate 
effects is, that the public has been turned from the reading 
of books, and hence from the acquisition of accurate informa- 
tion and the formation of the habit of systematic thinking, 
which culminate in the love and passion for Truth. It is, 
after all, this pernicious preaching of the Doctrine of Haste 
and the daily repercussion of its principles in the hasty, in- 
accurate or untrue presentation of grave and weighty 
opinion in the newspapers, which has led to this demoralisa- 
tion in the mentality of the modern public. Worse than all, 
with it has come the loss of the habit, and even the distaste 
for, the thorough reading of longer publications, such as 
books. It is against this central disease of modern mentality, 
this cancer eating into the healthy fibre of intellectuality, 
that I am solemnly and fervently urging all right-minded 
people to wage war. Truth on matters of importance cannot 
be acquired in haste. The market-place of action may 
present the material for thought ; but it is not the place for 
thought. The silent study will ever remain the workshop 
where the hard metal of fact — the gold that may be fashioned 
into a ring — is wrought into lasting and beneficent form. 
The silent study will always remain the sanctuary of Truth, 
and it is for us to keep it undefiled. ^ 



PART III. 



RELIGIOUS TRUTH 

In my book Aristodemocracy (Part III. Chap, vii.) under the 
heading "Duty to God," I have endeavoured to define in 
outhne man's duty to Truth in relation to his highest ideals. 
I must refer the reader to that chapter. But I may here 
quote one passage (pp. 347-348) : 

In man's ethical progression through human functions as 
such, through the objects which man wishes to produce or to 
modify in nature, he is necessarily led to his ultimate duties 
towards the world as a whole, not only the world as his sense 
and perceptions cause him to realise it, as it is, with all the 
hmitations which his senses and his powers impose upon him; 
but the world as his best thought, and his imagination, guided 
by his highest reason, lead him to feel that it ought to be — his 
ideal world. This brings him to his duty towards his highest 
and most impersonal ideals of an ordered universe, a cosmos, 
and of unlimited powers beyond the limitations of his capacities 
—-his duty to God. Ethics here naturally, logically, necessarily, 
lead to and culminate in, religion. 

The supreme duty in this final phase of ethics, man's religious 
duties, is truth to his religious ideals. It is here, more than in 
any other phase of his activities, that there can and ought to 
be no compromise. This is where he approaches the ideal world 
in all its purity, free^from all limitations and modifications by 
the imperfections of things temporal and material, as well as 
his own erring senses and perceptive faculties. There are no 
practical or sociai relationships, no material ends to be con- 
sidered, no material interests to be served or advantages gained. 
The only relationship is that between himself and his spiritual 
powers and the highest ideals which these enable him to formu- 
late or feel. His duty, therefore, is to strive after his highest 

10 — 2 



158 Religious Truth 

ideals of harmony, power, truth, justice and charity. Nor does 
this function of the human mind and this craving of the human 
heart require exceptional intellectual power or training. On the 
contrary, the history of the human race has shown that at 
every phase of human existence, even the earliest and most 
rudimentary, in the very remote haze of prehistoric times, the 
presence of this religious instinct and man's effort to satisfy it 
are manifested, even though it necessarily be in the crudest, 
the most unintelligent and even barbarous forms of what we 
call superstition and idolatry. 

Thus in all other spheres of life, man cannot claim absolute 
certainty. The exigencies imposed upon us by the outer 
world, in order to realise our convictions in action, make 
compromise and adaptation to these outer conditions neces- 
sary. In most cases we cannot there expect or claim absolute 
certainty ; we can only deal with probability and preference. 
Though we cannot always be sure that the line of action we 
have chosen is the absolutely correct, the only right one, we 
need have no doubt of the justification of our opinions and 
actions if we are satisfied that the balance of evidence, the 
highest probability, and therefore, our justified preference, 
lie in this one direction. There need be no doubt at least 
as regards the certainty of such preference; and our action 
need in no way be impeded or weakened in its energy, be- 
cause we cannot attain the absolute. 

There is only one sphere in which there is no room for 
compromise, i.e. our inner self and our relation to our highest 
ideals. They must in absolute truth be our highest ideals, 
and no lowering of them is admissible without destroying the 
life and soul of them. Any compromise, any admission of 
dogmas and behefs which we do not hold to be true, are, in 
the noblest and deepest significance of these symbolic words, 
a Sin against the Holy Ghost. 



Religious Truth 159 

But these deepest and noblest thoughts and feeHngs are in 
danger of being blunted and coarsened by frivolous and 
continuous expression and repetition. It is a right instinct, 
for instance, which keeps us from communicating and pub- 
lishing broadcast our deepest and most delicate feelings 
when we are in love. What deeply and truly concerns the 
inner relation of man to his highest self, his highest ideals, 
need not be shouted from the housetops. 

On the other hand, we are bound in truth to repudiate 
clearly and unequivocally the misleading adherence to recog- 
nised bodies professing beliefs which we do not share, even 
partially. We cannot subscribe or adhere to a church, creed 
or sect in the essential tenets of which we do not wholly 
beheve, without committing a sin against the Holy Ghost. 
Now, I venture to maintain, that if all people were to live 
up to this sacred duty, we should be astonished to find 
how large a number of the professed adherents to estabhshed 
creeds and churches are not in truth members of such con- 
gregations, and that these dissentients may constitute the 
best and most thoughtful element now within them. They 
continue, as far as their profession to the outer world is con- 
cerned, to be members of such churches, while in truth they 
are not. Whatever apparently cogent reasons they may 
adduce to others or to themselves, they are by their con- 
formity living a he. If this statement be true, all the 
established churches are faced with a great crisis in the 
immediate future — they must choose between reform or 
revolution. 

To begin with the great Christian churches — 
IheChmcr^ among them the Church of England. It cer- 
tainly has manifested a tradition in the past 
admitting of the greatest variety of religious opinion and 



i6o Religious Truth 

shadings of belief within its body, commonly subdivided 
into the three familiar groups of "High, Low and Broad"; 
and within these groups again there were and are varieties 
and shadings of definite belief. Now this principle of uni- 
versality and tolerance will have to be extended to a far 
greater degree if the Church is to survive as the centre of 
national belief and as the upholder of the highest Truth. 
The real essence of Christianity, as. in its purity it stands 
before history, will have to be found and confirmed, and 
this essence — the moral, spiritual and truly religious essence 
— ^will have to be made the distinctive and all-comprising 
condition of its existence : not wherein people differ hut wherein 
they agree lies the essence of all corporate existence justified 
in the material and spiritual world. Now, Christianity 
stands before the world as the Religion of Love. Christ 
stands before the world as the symbol of this Love. The 
sayings attributed to Him in the Sermon on the Mount and 
other passages in the Gospel, which bear out this all-com- 
prising belief, form the religious essence and spirit to which 
all good men and women can and will subscribe. They may 
differ on all other points of dogma; but they will and must 
agree on this bed-rock of human, social and civilised exist- 
ence in its truest and highest form. Whatever the theo- 
logian, the philologist, the critical historian or the sectarian 
controversialist may say, the term Christian as established 
in the Enghsh language and as used in such phrases as 
"Christian love," "the Christian spirit," "the Christian 
life," "Christian charity," "the Christian gentleman," 
"Christian civilisation" and "the Christian World" does 
connote this meaning. However much in the pages of 
history, recording the bloody strife on the battlefield of 
militant sectarianism, the burning stake and the torture 



Religious Truth i6i 

chamber, the various churches, sects and creeds may by 
their acts have beUed this essential spirit of Christ-hke love, 
it nevertheless remains stamped on the understanding of 
modern man as the central meaning in the very soul of his 
inner religious aspirations. If thus Christ's life and example, 
ending in the sacrifice of this very life to the highest ideals 
of religious faith, is made the central, essential and all-em- 
bracing doctrine, all shadings of religious belief can be com- 
prised within it, and a Christian Church can gather within 
its flock all good men and women. There will be no room for 
sectarian "nonconformity," and the central spirit of Chris- 
tian Love can and must, in the truth and rightness of its own 
spirit, be extended to the toleration of all other shadings of 
belief and doctrine and church government which do not 
conflict with this central spirit. There will be no need for 
physical and local isolation of the several groups of Christian 
religious doctrine and opinion. It will be, and ought to be, 
physically possible to divide and to distribute the occupation 
of the existing churches, (which reflect the past historical 
life of the British nation,) among the adherents of clearly- 
defined individual differences and shadings of doctrine and 
behef within the various sects. Different hours for services 
might be assigned to each sect, while at some times and 
on some occasions they might all unite in worship in one 
great national belief. But it must at once be conceded that 
preference should be given to the Church of England as at 
present constituted. 

We meet with the greatest difficulty when we 
ofRomT''^ approach the Cathohc Church of Rome. But 

the true and deep meaning of its catholicity 
ought to give direction and countenance to the realisation 
of this essentially Christian spirit, beyond the Church of 



1 62 Religious Truth 

England, to the whole Christian world. This certainly was 
the leading belief and hope in the days of Erasmus and the 
educational reformers of mankind, and gave inspiration to 
one of the truest and noblest figures in history — Sir Thomas 
More. It may be — I fondly believe it is — the beacon-light 
of many of those modernists still comprised within the papal 
flock, or those who have been forced out of it. After, in the 
first place, casting off all temporal claims and aspirations, 
it remains for this great historic body to fulfil its destiny in 
this world of ours ; but it must now face reform, revolution 
or ultimate dissolution. 

We must next examine the difficult problem 
the lews ^^^ concerning the Jewish communities who have 

retained the solidarity of their faith in the 
western civilised world. In actual Ufe they participate in 
what, according to the admitted meaning of the word in the 
English language, must be called Christian civilisation. 
More than that, they have, in proportion to their numbers, 
contributed most effectually to its establishment and ad- 
vancement in the western world. Whether in their own early 
sacred writings, in the precepts of men like Hillel or the later 
Rabbinic laws and teachings, they themselves have or have 
not in the past estabHshed and confirmed, independently 
of the Christian churches, Christ's religion of Love, they can 
and must subscribe to it in all that is essential. The great 
historic truth remains, that Christ in His earthly life was a 
Hebrew, and there was thus full justification for the division 
which Matthew Arnold made of the two main currents of 
modern civilisation into Hebraism and Hellenism. It might 
thus with some justice be urged by the Jews that the name 
for this universal church of the future should be, not the 
Christian, but the Hebraic Church. This contention would 



Religious Truth 163 

receive additional support from the fact that Christ Himself, 
in all His direct statements bearing upon the question of 
nationality and church, considered Himself a Jew — and 
moreover the true Jew and the upholder of the true Jewish 
Church. The early Christian Church for many years, perhaps 
centuries, held the same view; and the Romans considered 
the early Christians Jews and designated them as such. 
Even in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we 
have evidence of the first traces of antagonism between the 
Judaic and the Universalistic conception of the Christian 
faith; the thirteenth chapter still shows the tenacity with 
which adherence to the Judaic ritual and the preferential 
position of the Jewish race dominated the original Christian 
faith and Church. 

But, whatever may thus be urged, and rightly urged, in 
favour of the predominant share of Judaism in the origin and 
development of the Christian faith, and even of the Chris- 
tian Church, the fact remains, that the Pauline conception 
of a catholic, a purely and widely human and universal faith 
and church, prevailed. On the other hand the Jewish faith 
and the Jewish Church have always been marked, as an, 
essential feature of that religion, by — at least — some pre- 
ferential position assigned to the Jewish people and race, 
and this has been strengthened — ^with effective practical 
results in history — by some of its rites. Whatever be 
the supreme sentimental, historic and poetic justification 
of Zionist aspirations, recent political developments — 
which must, moreover, strike a resonant and sympathetic 
chord in the hearts of all people possessed of imagination 
and faith in the justice of human history — have clearly 
shown, that the Jewish faith and Jewish ideals include 
national ideals, even the most nefarious and misguided form 



164 Religious Truth 

of these — namely, ethnological nationalism. Moreover, in 
spite of the just and true efforts of such truth-loving and 
high-minded writers as Matthew Arnold, the terms Hebrew 
and Hebraic do not and cannot connote in English and most 
modern European languages the meaning which the term 
"Christian," as we have defined it, conveys. 

If this be true and if those of Jewish racial origin or the 
adherents of the various forms of Jewish churches (for they 
differ among each other almost as much as do the Christian 
churches) admit the truth of it, the objection to this clearly- 
established word in the English language ought not to pre- 
vent their adhesion to such a truly Catholic church, em- 
bodying their own essential ideals as well as those of all 
other civilised people in the western world^. If they look 
into their own hearts and courageously seek for the true 
causes of the opposition they may feel towards such ad- 
herence, they will find that it is the ever-present survival in 
their consciousness of the bitterness and antagonism bred 
of the centuries of persecution which their race and their 
faith have experienced at the hands of their "Christian" 
persecutors during successive ages. The curse of these un- 
christian feelings felt by Jews, justified though they be b}^ 
past history and present persecutions or prejudice among 
"Christians," is to be found in the survival of resentment 
and hatred springing from injustice, even though committed 

^ Some evidence that this is practically possible — nay, that in a 
definite form it has already been achieved — is furnished by the fact 
that the various undertakings and institutions carried into such 
fruitful and effective realization by the Young Men's Christian 
Association during this war, have had the support and even the 
active adhesion of professedly Jewish bodies and individuals, in spite 
of — nay, because of — the designation "Christian" in its true and 
noble significance. 



Religious Truth 165 

centuries ago. In the same way, the true stumbhngblock to 
the real pohtical union of the Irish with the Enghsh people, 
though they speak the same language, live under the same 
laws and have the same ultimate political aspirations, is the 
potent factor of remote reminiscences in the racial feuds of 
the Ireland of centuries ago and the injustice shown them in 
the past by England. The stereotyped antagonism^between 
Jew and Christian corresponds to the antagonism between 
Jew and Gentile in Biblical times. Now, as the Western 
Jews use the same language, have contributed to and live 
under the same laws and customs — in short, the civihsation 
of the Christian world — and as these" Gentiles " actually form 
the bulk of the Christian people of to-day, so the artificial 
sub-division between Jew and Christian ought never to be 
encouraged by the Jews — in fact, it becomes their duty to 
remove it entirely from modern life. There exists therefore 
no reason — the racial isolation having no justification what- 
ever — ^why those who profess the oldest historic creed of 
monotheism should not be incorporated in this Catholic 
Christian Church, with the essential creed of which they 
agree, and worship according to their own special rites in 
the national churches. 

We might even extend this all-embracing power and 
destiny of such a true church of the future to those who have 
drawn their inspiration from the Koran. Provided their 
ultimate ideals are truly the same as those dominating the 
western world, there is no reason why their own variety of 
belief should not be embraced within this wide and universal 
grasp of spiritual truth in the Religion of Love. Then, in the 
dim future it may at last be possible for East and West to 
meet. 

Man's spiritual life, which rules or ought to rule the body, 



J 66 Religious Truth 

is guided by the heart and the mind. As regards the heart, 
St Paul's words "but the greatest of these is Charity" ought 
to rule. As regards the mind, "the greatest of these is 
Truth" must be our guide. Both are harmonised by the 
imagination of man which gives Proportion and Beauty to 
man's feehngs, thoughts and acts and to the things of nature, 
and leads upwards to the ultimate ideals of man's life and of 
the universe in God. Whether such a unification of Creeds 
can or will be reaUsed or not, the one supreme duty for all 
truthful people remains : not to adhere to any religious sect 
in any dogmas of which they do not believe, or at least, to 
make known their disagreement and thus to uphold Truth 
as the foundation of all morahty. 



Reprinted from The North American Review of Sept. 15, 1903. 



APPENDIX I. 

THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY 

A University is educational because it is scientific ; a school 
is scientific because it is educational. 

It is not so much a question of science taking cognizance of 
hfe, as of hfe taking cognizance of science. 

There has never been a period when, as at the present moment, 
the question of education — especially of higher university edu- 
cation — has been so prominently in the minds of the Enghsh- 
speaking nations as a question of practical interest. There are 
several causes which have conduced to this widespread and 
active interest; though none of these alone can be said to be the 
really efficient one. First, a need for reform has been realized 
and urged from within, i.e. by the teachers and officials of 
universities themselves. Then, public munfficence has in Eng- 
land as well as in America been directed towards the univer- 
sities, and the question has naturally arisen as to the best uses 
to which wealth thus bestowed can be put. Lastly, the needs 
of actual, material hfe, the necessity of regulating commerce and 
industry — all the arts of peace and war — by the highest intelli- 
gence available in the nation, have been felt more strongly than 
ever before. It has been realized that those countries are ad- 
vancing rapidly in which the highest intellectual education is 
most directly and immediately brought to bear upon the pro- 
blems of actual hfe, and where science and life, so far from 
being divorced, are most closely wedded together in united 
action towards the increase of public efficiency and prosperity; 
while those where this is not the case are likely to fall 
into retrogression, whatever may be their natural resources and 
the strength of their tradition of national wealth or pre- 
dominance. 



1 68 Appendix I 

As regards the movement for university reform from within, 
there have been in America and Great Britain a number of 
thoughtful and experienced university teachers who have the 
interests of their own universities at heart, as they constantly 
bring enthusiasm and intelligence to bear upon the problem of 
advancing science and improving the intellectual Ufe of the 
nation to which they belong. Their number in English-speaking 
countries is great, and they may fairly be said to represent the 
leaders of the nation's intelligence. In America, I would single 
out one name among a host, as the man who has done more than 
any other in following up his expressed views by the actual 
organization of a university embodying, for the time being, the 
elements of modem needs in a tangible example and model 
university, the very establishment of which has gone far to 
influence the spirit and the work of all the other American uni- 
versities — I mean Dr Oilman, the first President of the Johns 
Hopkins University. 

In England, the most momentous reform of the great English 
universities, during more than six centuries of continuous 
activity, was initiated with the new statutes which came into 
operation in 1880. This reform, approaching near to a revo- 
lution of the whole system, had its origin within the universities 
themselves, and was supported by the majority of university 
teachers at Oxford and Cambridge, who (with all fairness to the 
more conservative students who acted in all conscientiousness) 
may be said to have represented the most prominent teachers 
and researchers in the universities and in the country. If, for 
the sake of symmetry, I were to select one name as a leading 
representative of this movement, I should single out that of the 
late Professor Henry Sidgwick of Cambridge. 

But the intellectual atmosphere within the universities of 
both countries had, for a long time, been modified and prepared 
by the fact that a large number of university teachers in both 
countries had travelled and studied abroad, especially at the 
universities of Oermany. While there imbibing the current 
methods of learning and research, they realized the ideals which 
underlie and actuate the intellectual life of Oerman universities, 
as well as the elements in which these differed from the ideals 



The Ideal of a University 169 

current in their own country. Such comparative study, besides 
freeing their minds from provincial prejudice, and raising their 
standards of academic efficiency, brought home to them with 
great force the crying need for academic reforms in their own 
universities. 

As regards the action of pubhc munificence : A number of new 
universities and colleges have been founded in the United 
States, as well as in the provinces of England, by private 
generosity. Many of these new American universities are ex- 
cellent and promising foundations. In many cases, however, 
the means supplied are ludicrously inadequate for the main- 
tenance — not to speak of the higher development — of real uni- 
versities. Frequently these new institutions were started in 
localities where there already existed one or more colleges of 
ancient standing, which were merely in want of financial support 
to rise to a higher state ot efficiency. In a country which has the 
inestimable advantage of a large number of higher institutions 
of learning, diffused all over the land, the question is not so 
much one of extension as of concentration. The injudicious 
foundation of such ill-equipped new bodies has not only bur- 
dened the land with an intellectual incubus and obligation ; but 
has seriously jeopardized the development of the older insti- 
tutions — both together tending to prevent any approach to an 
ideal university education and a consequent advance of the 
intellectual vitality of the nation. Had the misguided philan- 
thropists bestowed their funds for the endowment of new 
studies or new chairs in the existing institutions ; or better, for 
the adequate remuneration of the professoriate; or, better still, 
had they transferred their funds unconditionally into the hands 
of competent and trustworthy officials to bestow them where 
needed — nothing but good could have resulted. 

In England, on the other hand, there has been for centuries 
a practical monopoly of university education on the part of 
Oxford and Cambridge, retarding even the advance of a great 
metropolitan university in London. The need for decentraliza- 
tion in this sphere of national life has rightly been felt to be 
paramount. In recent years, the timely advent of private 
generosity has resulted in the foundation of several colleges 



170 Appendix I 

and universities in the "provinces," especially in the great 
manufacturing centres, which certainly tend to supply a crying 
want, and which may, if wisely directed, lead to the quickening 
of university life, and to a new era of higher education in the 
British Empire. But up to the present there is danger lest these 
foundations, with their short-sighted, hand-to-mouth policies 
and ideals, may retard and vitiate, rather than advance and 
elevate, the higher learning of Great Britain. The founder or 
founders of such bodies insist upon carrying out their own pre- 
conceived notions as to the needs, the purpose or the utility of 
a university, crude notions based upon some individual ex- 
perience or taste in their own Ufe or education — or even trade. 
A bias may thus be given to the organization, to the aims and 
to the spirit of the work, which is far from harmless, which can- 
not be remedied subsequently when bitter experience has led 
to the recognition of a mistake; for a bias in the very founda- 
tions affects the durabiUty as well as the usefulness and beauty 
of a structure. There is in the minds of such people either a 
total absence of ideals, or a mistaken ideal as to the nature and 
purpose of universities; and their views are rapidly being ab- 
sorbed by the whole nation, perhaps thus retarding the in- 
tellectual advance of an empire. 

The thoughtful among us must often realize that "public 
munificence" is not an unmixed blessing. It is one of the 
charges which the opponents of congested capital may urge 
against the possession of great wealth by one person, that the 
power it gives to an individual may be directed into channels 
affecting public life and widespread interests without respon- 
sibility. In fact, any inquiry as to capability, motive or re- 
sponsibility, where actions decidedly have the character of 
charity and philanthropy, readily assumes the appearance of 
the ungenerous and ungrateful. Still, it may fairly be ques- 
tioned, whether the action of individuals — whose good inten- 
tions are unassailable — in giving a positive and definite direction 
to the spirit and methods of public work, and in affecting the 
distant future of higher national life by some preconceived 
theory or conviction held by one to whom the nation would never 
have looked for guidance in such matters, may not be nefarious. 



The Ideal of a University 171 

If the possible evils arising out of misdirected munificence 
apply to the foundation of universities, they apply to the endow- 
ment of scholarships, purses and all other forms of endowment 
leading or coaxing or bribing the young to learn. These present 
the readiest, most common and most manifest form of doing 
something for learning and for the poor, while at the same time 
it requires least thought and trouble to the donor who wishes 
"to do the right thing." In former ages, when, on the one 
hand, national institutions of learning were not organized or 
readily accessible, or when the learned class of "clerks" was 
chiefly enhsted from the poor, there was a call for the wide 
application of such benefaction. But to-day, whatever good 
may be manifest in individual cases, the need no longer exists 
— nay, I strongly hold that the existing profusion of such 
scholarships in schools and universities in England effectively 
blocks the way to the spread of the highest spirit of education, 
and that the tendency of further endowments of this kind is to 
pauperize the national intelligence, I do not mean research- 
scholarships, but those given to support the student at school 
or university during the period of his preparatory education. 
The sums recently lavished towards helping the learners would 
have been more effectively used if devoted to the refinement 
and elevation of the centres where the highest learning is to 
be given. I am reconciled to the splendid bequest of Mr Cecil 
Rhodes, because it embodies, impresses and perpetuates a great 
idea of significance to the world's history: the international, 
the uniting power which the higher intellectual life possesses 
among the nations who represent civilization. The huge sums 
thus given by Mr Rhodes will not be wasted if they merely serve 
to bring before the eyes of the world this common tie of 
humanity and perpetuate this lesson. But the same cannot be 
said, for instance, of the signal generosity which Mr Carnegie 
has shown to his native Scottish land. One of the several 
reasons why England lags behind Scotland in the diffusion of 
university education among its population lies in the over- 
growth of such endowments in England. The present system 
of scholarships has gone far to jeopardize the traditions of 
higher learning in England ; while in Scotland the appreciation 

W. T. II 



172 Appendix I 

of — ^nay, the enthusiasm for — learning is one of the most 
valuable national assets ; and I sincerely trust that Mr Carnegie's 
well-meant philanthropy may not seriously threaten the exist- 
ence of this national virtue. 

Lastly, we come to the strong desire for reform of the uni- 
versity system which is wide-spread among the general public 
both in England and in the United States. 

Both countries have exceptional advantages for the advance 
of national prosperity in the possession of great capital and of 
natural resources. But, while Great Britain sees its long- 
standing position of commercial and industrial predominance 
threatened, the United States recognizes the stupendous poten- 
tiality of its future economic development and is anxious now 
to prepare for its realization; nay, seeing still farther and 
deeper, it has misgivings with regard to the period when the 
fortune inherent in virgin soil and the vigorous, untrammelled 
spirit of young enterprise will no longer be its peculiar advan- 
tage over the competing nations of the Old World. 

More and more, though in a vague and loose way, the public 
has come to realize, on the one hand, the practical use of 
Science, and, on the other, a deficiency in our educational 
system which does not produce a sufficiently immediate appli- 
cation of scientific achievement to the needs of actual life. This 
has been impressed still more forcibly when the competition of 
a country like Germany in commerce and manufacture is keenly 
felt, a country, moreover, which is not blessed with any of those 
advantages in capital or natural resources, or any previous 
position of vantage from which to begin its onward movement 
of economic ascendancy. In every class it is being realized that 
something must be wrong when England appears to be falling 
back where Germany is advancing. Cheapness of labour alone 
cannot account for this, especially in view of the advance of 
American industry and the dearness of labour there. But the 
merchant and manufacturer find that the principle of organiza- 
tion and direction of work in their own spheres, that the 
"staff" from the highest to the lowest, are more efficient even 
when Germans leave home and come into competition in other 
countries: that the clerks, the travellers, the chemists, the 



The Ideal of a University 173 

electricians employed from Germany are more ef&cient and 
successful. There may be, perhaps justly, some reasons for 
accounting for this superiority less wounding to our national 
self-esteem. But it seems to be universally felt by the leaders of 
our commerce and industries that men are better trained for 
these practical economic purposes in Germany than they are 
at home. "Something must be wrong at home," they feel and 
freely say. "What are our schools and universities for? They 
must take immediate cognizance of our national wants. They 
have been going on for years and centuries in their happy-go- 
lucky old-fashioned way of training clergymen and gentlemen. 
Let them now respond to the crying needs of life," 

The first phase of the movement following upon the indefinite 
discontent is the one we have now attained to, both in England 
and the United States. I should like to call this the Technical 
Phase. And, though I believe in technical education when 
rightly conceived and rightly pursued, the present is, I sin- 
cerely hope, merely a phase of transition in the establishment 
of the true ideals of national education. Each member of the 
community made discontented with our educational system 
through the sensitive channels of material self-interest, desires 
to see reform or improvement in the immediate sphere of his 
own narrow horizon. Though not as grotesquely unintelligent 
as the butcher whose letter a headmaster of a prominent school 
in one of our great manufacturing towns showed me, their views 
are the same in kind. The butcher wrote that "he desired his 
boy to be a good butcher, and that only those subjects should be 
taught to his lad which would make him that." But the would- 
be educational reformer who is a merchant demands that our 
universities, if they are to be of use to the cbuntry and have his 
support, should at once establish Commercial Departments or 
Colleges. If the industry be concerned with one aspect of 
chemistry or brewing, or tanning, or weaving, the narrow and 
disjointed part of "applied" chemistry, the art (or science) of 
brewing, tanning and textile studies, and every conceivable 
division of craft and learning are to have their departments, or, 
at least, are to be directly considered in the teaching of a uni- 
versity. The same applies to agriculture and the other occupa- 

II— 2 



174 Appendix I 

tions of modem life. That is what, in the minds of such people, 
is meant by "the universities taking cognizance of life." 

In a less grotesque form, eminent men of light and leading 
have given public expression to views which, if they do not 
advocate such absurd developments of our national educational 
system, tend to encourage such views. We are constantly re- 
minded of the great use which universities and men of higher 
science in Germany are to the advance of national prosperity; 
but the fact is ignored that in Germany the government and the 
people at large are by tradition and training prepared to appre- 
ciate the utility of such higher education and of higher science, 
and make direct appeal to the sources of highest information. 
The German manufacturer is sufficiently well educated to follow 
sympathetically the efforts of men of pure science, whether in 
chemistry, in physics, in mathematics, in history or languages 
and literature, to respect their high vocation and to encourage 
them in their pursuits. Such a man will, for instance, employ 
tvventy chemists who are carrying on researches in directions 
remote from the industrial chemistry applying to his immediate 
manufacture, where in England there are but two chemists 
carrying on "hand-to-mouth" science for the unimproved pro- 
duction of staple articles which will soon be superseded by new 
articles evolved out of higher scientific research. 

In these views of our advocates of university reform the cart 
is put before the horse. The applicability of science to the actual 
needs of economic life is increased and made facile by the in- 
telhgent readiness of the public to receive it and, above all, to 
possess some correct notion of its nature, its province, its 
methods and aims. The premature intrusion of the " technical *' 
point of view will only retard this reasonable application, as it 
will lower or stultify the efforts of true men of science. 

Even Germany seems for the moment to be contaminated by 
this lowering atmosphere of technical science which penetrates 
into all strata of national education. It is not likely to do them 
much harm, because the traditions and living effectiveness of 
their highest scientific institutions are so strong that they are 
bound to predominate, to modify, and to direct the work and 
the teaching of their technical institutions (nearly all the 



The Ideal of a University 175 

teachers of these are drawn from the professoriate of their uni- 
versities), and the strength of these traditions will probably 
outlast the momentary contamination before it has reached the 
core of the intellectual life of the nation. Germany is, in every 
phase of its intellectual life, at this moment living on the work 
of its great thinkers and workers of the generations immediately 
preceding our own, of which Virchow may be the last repre- 
sentative — though a large number of younger university pro- 
fessors are prepared to maintain the spirit of the past in its 
highest and purest form. 

What the German universities have done for their national 
life, and what they stand for in the eyes of the world, is the 
establishment and the diffusion of the Spirit of Thoroughness 
which goes down to the root of things and aspires to the summit 
of human knowledge. Germany is great in this respect, because 
the intellectual life of the nation and the educational system 
have, in their very constitution and in the actual history of their 
development, been regulated by the highest aims, the highest 
attainments of intellectual life, in their universities, to which 
all the lower forms lead or tend. These highest attainments and 
ideals are not left to themselves as the haphazard result of the 
lower necessities of education ; the schools do not so much pro- 
duce the universities as the universities infuse their spirit of 
thoroughness and their intellectual ideals into the schools. Both 
thus react upon the people and upon the actual material and 
economic life of the whole nation. The teaching of the industrial 
sciences, of agriculture, of medicine, nay, of school-mastering, 
is carried on by men trained in the universities in the spirit of 
pure science as there cultivated. Thus, as an ever-present force 
beyond the confines of the universities themselves, in all strata 
of national life, whether consciously held or indirectly and 
vaguely felt as a remote tradition, there is before the nation 
the true ideal of a university. 

The possession of true ideals may be one of the most practical, 
not to say material, assets of an individual or a nation. As it 
may be the most practical method of setting out on a journey 
before all things to know exactly the journey's goal, so it is 
most important in the organization of national education to be 



176 Appendix I 

clear as to the highest goal in the development of intellectual 
life. As we often find it important to correct the morbid ten- 
dency of the unpractical man, the doctrinaire, the visionary, by 
reminding him of the impracticability of his ideas and by 
directing his attention to the physical conditions which decide 
their realizability — the ways and means — so it may often be 
necessary to remind the "practical man," the man of action or 
the opportunist, to look to his fundamental principles and his 
ideals, and only then to set his practical energies in the direction 
prescribed by them. This is especially the case when the work 
is concerned with wider, more general, as well as more funda- 
mental subjects and organizations, which are not ephemeral but 
which determine the life of a nation for ages to come. 

A university is for a nation the nearest approach, as a recog- 
nizable, tangible, and living institution, to the ideal of man's 
intellectual development — as, in another way, the churches are 
the tangible and recognizable centres of the moral and religious 
life, and the art academies, museums, and theatres of the 
aesthetic life, of a nation. 

It is not the outcome of vague theorizing, but the result of 
sober observation and experience, which leads us to conclude 
that the German educational system is thus efficient because, 
not only does its whole organization culminate in this highest 
type, the university, with its pure ideals of science and learning, 
but because the keynote of the whole intellectual education, 
down to the elementary schools {a fortiori for the technical 
schools) is struck by this highest form, at once most general and 
comprehensive as well as special and thorough. It thus pene- 
trates through ail layers of society and has become a national 
characteristic. Life takes cognizance of science. The more 
civihzation advances, the greater becomes the need for the 
regulation of practice by theory, the more important for ea:ch 
State that universities should be thus efficient and should be 
organized in view of the highest and purest ideals of science and 
learning. 

This view of a university, however, is far from being the pre- 
dominant one in England and the United States. The mistake 
with us is that, until quite recently, the only conception of a 



The Ideal of a University 177 

university has been purely educational, if not pedagogic. It was 
considered an establishment for the higher training of a small 
percentage of the inhabitants in each country, chiefly of the 
upper or professional classes. It was simply a higher school, 
really a high school for older boys. 

I think it is so important that this fatal misconception should 
be exposed and that the right view should prevail, that I do 
not shrink from applying the two methods which the late Bishop 
Creighton considered powerful instruments of education — ex- 
aggeration and paradox. A university, then, differs from a 
school in that it is not primarily educational ; a great part of 
its function in national life would remain if there were not a 
single pupil or student within its walls to teach. The spirit of 
the place should be as different from that pervading a school 
as — though in quite a different way — the atmosphere of the 
real practical life which follows upon the university studies is 
to the graduate entering upon his active vocation in the struggle 
for existence. Each will produce the greatest effect education- 
ally, the more each is true to its own peculiar spirit. For the 
moment I choose to ignore the directly educational function of 
a university; though, by maintaining its impersonal and purest 
ideal as the national embodiment of highest science and learning, 
it becomes most efficient as an educational institution for the 
production of the active and successful as well as cultured 
citizens. 

But the real danger at this moment comes, not so much from 
the confusion of a university with a school, as from its con- 
tamination by the technical spirit. Here lies the real danger. 
The startling and epoch-making discoveries made of recent 
years by the application of science to the needs of commerce and 
industry have at last impressed the unthinking with the use of 
science, until such tangible use has become the test for its right 
of existence, the justification for its pursuit. The institutions 
where "science" is cultivated and advanced are supposed to 
derive their claim to existence and support from such use, and 
their organization and work are to be regulated in view of the 
direct application of science and learning to the needs of life. 

Not only in such a view is a narrow and grossly material 



178 Appendix I 

aspect of economic life substituted for the whole of the in- 
tellectual Hf e of a civilized community ; but science is narrowed 
down to the most irrational conception of appUed science, the 
very nature and function of which are grossly misunderstood. 
For one instance of applied science which has produced results 
appreciable by the commercial mind, innumerable attempts 
and experiments are made in every direction without such re- 
sults; there is a continuous and vast expenditure of reasoning 
power about us constantly at work, which never comes to the 
cognizance of the public and can never be apprehended by the 
commercial mind. Just as, to use a trite simile, the stupendous 
fortunes made by one great speculation, which obtrude them- 
selves upon the public notice, are not true tests of the effort 
and the energy expended in the whole world of finance and 
commerce, of which nothing rises to the plane of manifest and 
startling public recognition. 

A puerile attempt to organize the study of "hand-to-mouth" 
science with a view to achieving such signal success in its im- 
mediate application, will end in failure. For the weakness of the 
"technical" aspect of science is, that, not going sufficiently 
deep, it does not carry science farther. Empiricism in science 
is most "unpractical," because it leaves to chance what the 
human mind in its highest theoretical function tends to control. 
Most of the discoveries and inventions which have had such 
momentous bearings upon our material and industrial life could 
never have been made but for the work of the highest scientific 
theorists, carried on in a spirit in no way technical, which is, 
in one aspect, opposed to practical application — at all events, 
ignores it while the inquiry is progressing. I mean scientific 
work which has no manifest practical application. Examples 
are innumerable and are familiar to those who are at all con- 
versant with true science. Let me but single out a few. 

The most recent invention is perhaps the most startling and, 
in some ways, the most momentous as regards its effect upon 
life in our age — I mean Wireless Telegraphy. 

Yet I am not overstating my case when I say that this in- 
vention is inconceivable without a continuous series of purely 
theoretical inquiries preceding it. In one sense, it is but a 



The Ideal of a University 179 

corollary of the general scientific and purely theoretical work, 
in its bearings upon electricity, done by Faraday, by Sir 
Humphry Davy in his separation of Sodium and Potassium, 
and finally by Hertz and Clerk-Maxwell in their theoretical 
work upon certain electric waves. Perhaps it may be said that 
the development of most of Modern Physics, in its minutest 
practical applications, could not have been achieved without 
the purely theoretical work of Sir Isaac Newton grouping round 
his discovery of the law of gravitation. 

The work of Pasteur, whose whole life illustrates the realiza- 
tion of the highest scientific ideals, has led to the most varied 
applications of scientific principles to the needs of human life — 
nay, of industries concerned with our daily subsistence. The 
same may be said of Cohn, whose researches into Bacteriology 
were begun in a purely theoretical study of botany ; or of Lister's 
application of these general biological results to antisepsis. Nay, 
it would be easy to show how the thoroughness of such theo- 
retical work on micro-organisms has directly influenced brewing 
and many other industries, besides advancing agriculture in all 
its ramifications. But the main point to bear in mind is: that 
it is inconceivable how any amount of technical work in brew- 
ing, in industrial or agricultural chemistry, could by itself have 
produced the "practical and material" results which commerce 
and industries now exploit. These were only achieved by the 
concentration of all intellectual power, in a strictly scientific 
method, on pure theory, without any thought of practical 
application. One small outcome of the stupendous theoretical 
work of the great chemist Bunsen is the "Bunsen burner," 
known to nearly every artisan. I venture to say that, without 
the establishment of the theoretical principle therein involved, 
the main factors underlying the development of locomotion in 
the motor-car, as well as many other practical results, would 
never have been attained. Professor Ewing informs me that 
his researches which led to the establishment of the property of 
hysteresis in metals (now in direct use and constant application 
by manufacturers of metal and engineers), were the result of 
purely theoretical work with no immediate apprehension of its 
practical use even after it was made. I wonder what the giant 



i8o Appendix I 

in pure mathematics. Gauss (who made the famous toast: 
" I drink to Pure Mathematics, the only science which has never 
been polluted by a practical application"), would think of the 
practical application of his Methode dev Kleinsten Quadrate; or 
Laplace, w^ere he to see the results of his work on the Doctrine 
of Probabilities in daily application in the offices of actuaries 
and Life Insurance Companies. 

I could continue page after page to give striking illustrations, 
which would all show how the most momentous and practical 
inventions of "Science" were either directly made by the pur- 
suit of research in its highest and purest theoretical form, or, at 
least, could not have been made unless based upon such work. 
I could show that the life of " Science " upon which the material 
prosperity of a nation depends, can only be advanced, can only 
progress into the dim regions of the unknown and unachieved, 
through the conscientious labour of individuals who make up 
what constitutes a real university, who realize and maintain its 
spirit. 

But in view of the pressure of actual life and of the clamour of 
ignorant popular opportunism, it is no easy task to maintain 
this spirit of pure science and learning, both for the individual 
"professors" of such a high vocation, and for the institutions 
which oueht to be their natural home — the universities. The 
temptations and allurements of material, mercenary reward are 
often too great for the man of science, and the insinuation of the 
immediately "technical" spirit into the universities is the rock 
ahead in their course of beneficent action for the nation and the 
world at large. 

It requires the supreme effort of self-possession, the constant 
presence of the living ideals, enforced upon the workers by the 
atmosphere of the universities supported by the government 
and by public opinion, to produce effective scientific work, and 
to maintain this efficiency, upon which even the ultimate 
material well-being of the whole community depends. The 
premature intrusion of secondary application, of practical and 
economic use, into any scientific inquiry is likely to prove fatal 
to its fruitful termination. The standard and test of the value 
of higher academic work are in no way to be this " application." 



The Ideal of a University i8i 

If anything, it is wiser to adhere to Gauss's paradox — it will in 
the aggregate prove to be more practical and profitable to the 
national life as a whole. The chairs of pure mathematics and of 
Sanscrit are to be regarded as equally important and equally 
worthy of honour and support as the chairs of mechanics and 
agricultural chemistry. 

It is in the interest of the nation that these high and pure 
ideals of a university, as above all the impersonal centre of the 
nation's striving after truth, be maintained — nay, that by the 
action of the government, of munificent patrons, and of the 
whole public, they be enforced and be diffused and made 
familiar among the population itself. Life will then take cog- 
nizance of Science to the advancement of both. 

I have endeavoured in the above merely to impress the most 
important, the «essential one, among the ideals which a uni- 
versity implies; and I have, moreover, impressed this chiefly 
by insisting upon its bearings on actual life, especially the 
economic aspect of life. When such an ideal is developed and 
ensured in a university, technical training and technical in- 
stitutions, no doubt of deep importance to the nation, will 
derive inspiration from the universities and will be all the more 
efficient. Without such ideals, however, I doubt whether 
technical training will be of great or lasting advantage. 



Extract from The Study of Art in Universities, London and 
New York, 1896, pp. 51 seq., Harper & Bros. 



APPENDIX II. 

SCIENCE AND EMPIRICISM, THEORY 
AND PRACTICE 

It is not needful for me to show to this audience the justification 
of universities in this highest sense in terms of practical life. It 
can easily be done, and has frequently had capable expositors. 
But I feel that in our time of popularization, of the direct 
appeal to popular approval for all higher inteliectual efforts, it 
ought, perhaps, to be done more than ever^. The cry for direct 
encouragement of our industries through technical schools and 
all other means, the reorganization and spread of our elementary 
schools throughout the country, the extension of higher teach- 
ing, causes the voices of some friends of popular education to be 
raised to such a pitch in clamouring for its just requirements, 
that the tone of their appeals assumes the character of anger, 
until it loses itself in a protest against those forms of study and 
education which are not immediately responsive to these general 
demands. But the louder and more urgent these appeals grow, 
and the more they may strike a sympathetic chord in our own 
breasts, the more ought we to insist upon maintaining in its 
highest form of purity the spirit which guides the truly scientific 
work of universities. We may almost be justified in emphasizing 
this spirit in the form of a paradox. The well-known toast of 
the famous mathematician. Gauss, will bear repetition that may 
be instructive: "I drink," he said, "to Pure Mathematics, the 
only science which has never been defiled by practical applica- 
tion." In so far, pure mathematics are the most complete ex- 
position of university study. 

1 See Note C,, p. 188. 



Science and Empiricism, Theory and Practice 183 

As regards the justification of such pursuits in life, they re- 
spond to a primary instinct of man, namely, his desire to know; 
and it is enough for us to say, in the first instance, that as this 
primary instinct in man is in no way harmful or unsocial, it is 
worthy of satisfaction and encouragement. And it is right that 
institutions should exist which are meant directly and in their 
chief purpose to satisfy and encourage this primary instinct in 
its purest form. And if we leave individual man and go to the 
social community as a whole, we find that, in the interest of the 
community taken collectively, it is right that there should be 
one centre, devoted exclusively to the search after truth for its 
own sake, to make this common life complete; as in the life of 
each household every side is arranged according to the natural 
tasks governing it: the considerations of profession, health, 
amusement, reading, thought; and as in the life of every in- 
dividual man, each one of his faculties ought to have adequate 
exercise and play to maintain complete normality and 
health. 

But, of course, it is all a question of proportion. The ques- 
tion, namely, of how much time and energy are individually or 
collectively to be devoted to each side. And with regard to the 
claims which the universities have in the common life of 
civilized communities, it is fair to consider, how great their 
claims are in comparison with other educational institutions, 
especially the elementary schools. It is needless to sa}'-, for 
instance, that in a community which is just entering into 
the stage of higher civilization, and in which the school system 
has not as yet been developed, so that its citizens are ignorant 
of the rudiments of necessary learning for the purposes of 
civilized communication, commerce and industry, it would 
be unwise to begin with the higher university education until 
the elementary schools which minister to the most general in- 
tellectual needs of the people have been thoroughly organized. 
Elementary schools respond to the common needs of daily life 
and are therefore essential to it, and they apply to all citizens 
equally. Not so, it is maintained, universities. Therefore the 
schools are much more necessary, and it is but right that they 
should be much more widespread than universities. But, grant- 



184 Appendix II 

ing this, and, in consequence, repelling all undue claims of 
higher education where they may conflict with those of schools, 
nobody would deny the right, nay, the necessity of encouraging 
the highest theoretical study within its due proportion in the 
community. It might then be said by the opponent of highest 
university study, the exaggerated practical man, that the use 
of such highest study being comparatively small, its direct and 
tangible bearings upon the immediate practical wants of the 
mass of the community being restricted, its claims should be in 
due proportion repressed. But even he will admit that there 
ought in every civilized country to be some place or places 
where, to say the least, this side of human nature should be 
satisfied and developed, without which the community would 
not be perfectly organized and completely equipped as a body 
at the height of modem culture. However much we may re- 
strict its local habitation, it ought to satisfy this theoretical 
craving in the purest form, most directly and completely, that 
is, without alien or ulterior motives and aims. It is more urgent 
for the welfare of the community to have lighthouses and 
meteorological stations than to have astronomical observatories. 
But if we have several hundred lighthouses and stations, we may 
well have one observatory. And in this due proportion of i to 
200, we may say that the observatory is as necessary to our life 
as are the lighthouses and stations. Nor will it be wise to vitiate 
arid lower the spirit of the astronomer by modifying his thought 
and action in the direction of the practical functions of the other 
officials. 

And for the moment accepting this almost paradoxical 
limitation of the function of a university, I would then distin- 
guish it from the ordinary schools, in that its primary aim is 
not educational but theoretical and scientific; whereas the 
primary aim of schools is educational and not in the first in- 
stance theoretical or scientific. And in so far as they are both 
educational bodies, I would say that a university becomes 
educational, because it is scientific; and a school must be 
scientific because it is educational. I could easily show how 
ultimately this concentration upon theoretical aims on the 
part of universities will prove most practical in their relation 



Science and Empiricism, Theory and Practice 1 85 

not only to general education, but also to the most material 
aspects of public life^. 

In this sense I have viewed universities chiefly as the homes 
of research, as bodies which are intrusted by the community 
with the highest interests of pure science which they are directly 
to further and, by the collective efforts of its working members 
to advance, keeping pace with the progress made by the whole 
community in civilization and general life. 

While maintaining this spirit the}^ will best be able to turn 
their energies to account when they flow into the broader 
educational channels. The university teacher ought always to 
be a researcher himself, and however much he may consider it 
his duty to further the education of the students who put them- 
selves under his guidance as a teacher, he ought to do it in the 
spirit of a researcher. But the objection may be made, and has 
frequently been made, that we shall then only train specialists 
and only teach in the spirit of specialists^. My answer to this is, 
that it is right that we should do this even from the point of 
view of general education. It stands to reason, nay, it is almost 
a platitude to say that one who wishes to devote his life to some 
special study or profession must learn his subject as thoroughly 
as possible, which means as a specialist. But even those who do 
not wish to apply the knowledge they may gain at the university 
in the direct channels of the subject they there pursue, even for 
those the education which they receive in this spirit of pure 
theoretical and scientific knowledge and the methods of thought 
and of work which are inculcated in them through any study 
followed systematically, cannot but be of the highest advantage. 

^ See Note D, p. 191. 

2 I can only say that to listen to the stammering of a Helmholtz 
or a Ranke would be more impressive and instructive than to hear 
the most perfect oratory of a popularizer of physics or history. The 
personality of the men, whom we know to be the leaders and advan- 
cers of their own science in the world, to which they have con- 
scientiously devoted their lives, is an educational vehicle which can- 
not be over-estimated. So also I think the reading of a book like 
Huxley's Crayfish will convey more insight into Biology than any 
general popular treatise. 



1 86 Appendix II 

First, it can only be pure gain to any man that in the course of 
his career he should for one short period of his existence live in 
this purely intellectual atmosphere, and that he should acquire 
the scientific habit of mind, the power of co-ordinating facts, 
'the habit of following causality to its earliest stages, and the 
faculty of careful observation and of complete concentration of 
mind. To turn these methods into life, to make them a part of 
his very consciousness is no small gain. And in order that the 
student should reap these advantages to the fullest degree it is 
necessary that the teacher should himself be imbued with the 
exclusively theoretical spirit of investigation, that he should 
not be influenced by the practical considerations of the life 
which, by an act of sympathy, he may prescribe in the future to 
the students who are before him. Nay, even the immediate 
practical issues, such as the examinations which the students 
may have to pass, may dilute or perturb the purity of the spirit 
which is to permeate his every effort as an educator. 

We, university teachers, know the dangers arising out of this 
thraldom of examinations, which, however useful and necessary 
they may be as tests and as stimuli, still act as degrading and 
vitiating to the spirit of our teaching when we admit of their 
undue intrusion into our academic instruction. And in the 
arrangement and organization of our courses of study we must 
be careful lest the pressure which comes from without, the 
desire of intellectually cutting our coat according to the cloth, 
lead us to compromise with the claims of the would-be practical 
life. I remember a phrase of a German savant which impressed 
me much at the time. He warned us against what he called Die 
Wissenschaft auf dem Prdsentierteller, which reminds me of the 
story of the lady in a French salon^. We cannot turn the uni- 

1 I am reminded of this story told by the late George Henry Lewes. 
The scene was laid in a brilliant Parisian salon, where an eminent 
French man of science was conversing with the hostess, a spirituelle, 
though thoroughly worldly, society-lady. He possessed that child- 
like simplicity and sincerity which often mark the truly great man ; 
and thus he was deceived by the tone of intense interest which she 
adopted when asking him (to make conversation) about some law of 
nature (say, the conservation of energy) which was just then being 



Science and Empiricism, Theory and Practice 1 87 

versity into a gre^t culinary institution in which scientific dishes 
are prepared and cooked to suit the palates and the digestions 
of all the different professional candidates. We rob them of one 
of the greatest educational advantages, namely, the search after 
the intellectual food itself which will cause them to grow up as 
strong and efficient men, ready to cope with all the varied and 
unforeseen difficulties of life, instead of effeminate, narrow- 
chested s^'-barites who can only thrive under the conditions in 
which they have been brought up in their provincial home. We 
cannot prepare a small dose of physiological study for the 
student of medicine, just enough to suffice him for his service 
at the sick bed; but we can send him to the most thorough 
physiologist, such as we have here, and, without waste of time, 
he can there drink in pure scientific information at the fountain- 
head of real research. We cannot extract from history, that is 
to say from the development of man in the past, those facts 
which may be useful for the training of the future statesman, 
thereby caricaturing history and enfeebling the mind of this 
future prime minister. But we can for once in his life, lead him 
to concentrate all his energies upon thorough knowledge, and 
we can increase his fund of accurate information and strengthen 
his power of thinking rightly. So, too, in dealing with art in a 
university, the student must clearly hold before his mind this 
purely theoretical aim, ignoring all others : to know and only to 
know. 

much discussed. The savant, delighted with this sign of interest on 
the part of a woman whom he had considered frivolous, entered upon 
a lucid exposition of the main principles, and was so much wrapt up 
in his subject, that he did not notice how her eyes were wandering 
about the room. But he was pulled up short when she asked, with a 
touch of naive coquetry: "Mais est-ce bien vrai, ga, monsieur?" He 
at once drew himself up and, with a deep bow, turning both hands to 
his breast, he said: "Parole d'honneur, madame !" 



W. T. 12 



1 88 Appendix II 



NOTE C 

(O.C. pp. ii8 seq.) 

It has often been maintained that the EngHsh 

Indifference people are naturally opposed to such theoretical 

to Scientific study, that they have a practical bias, and that 

Pursuits in -^ ^ ^ 

England. they have a dislike to, if not a contempt for, 

abstract speculation and pure theory, which goes 
with their craving for the concrete. This aversion to speculation 
may possibly be racial. But I doubt this. One need merely 
quote the Germans, who are our next of kin, and in w^hom the 
love of speculation and of theoretical science has been most 
highly developed, to confirm this doubt. Nor should I even 
believe that this is a national characteristic of the British 
people ; for one may at once point to the Scotch, who have been 
marked for the widespread interest which they take in subjects 
of philosophical speculation. I may at once say that this differ- 
ence between the English and the Scotch may be accounted for 
by one circumstance in the moral development of the two 
peoples, which may, in its turn, contribute to the understanding 
of the problem before us. It is to be found in the different re- 
ligious history of the two peoples. The English have had an 
established church, while the Scotch people are largely made up 
of those who have had to fight for, or to fight out in themselves, 
their religious opinions. As this struggle on the part of a truly 
"protestant" people will develop the speculative and abstract 
mood, even when applied to other subjects, so a formally 
established church with its doctrines will lead to a comparative 
indifference, if not an aversion, to such speculation — at all 
events, it does not encourage it. In the whole history of thought 
in all times and climes there has been an early religious stage to 
the study of pure science and philosophy. 

One has often heard the complaint raised by English repre- 
sentatives of pure science, of the lack of real interest in their 
efforts on the part of the people ; and by the people they are far 
from meaning the populus, or the masses, but they include " the 



Science and Empiricism, Theory and Practice 1 89 

classes " ; in fact, the various movements and associations among 
the labouring classes have to a great degree stimulated the 
interests of these people in matters of thought. The complaint 
is made in the universities also, that there is little widespread 
interest in the higher university studies; and even in the uni- 
versities themselves for what is called research. I believe this 
complaint is justified to a considerable degree; but I do not 
think it essential to the English people, but accidental. We 
might here again point to Scotland and to the United States of 
America, which differ from us in this point, and which therefore 
go far to prove the accidental nature of this feature. 

Among these causes I think the most important the peculiar 
nature of school and university education in England. In the 
first place, there have been, and even are now, fewer complete 
universities in England than in other countries similarly 
situated abroad. The result is that, in spite of the few great 
personalities which England has always produced and which 
stand out as the most marked luminaries on the horizon of 
science, there is not a large and important body of such workers, 
sufficiently large to be recognized by the near-sighted mass of 
the people, and thus in a rough and ready way to impress them 
with the importance and stability of such pursuits i. In the 
eyes of the people science has not yet risen to the standing of a 
profession. 

Our school education, so far from encouraging reverence or 
love for scientific work, tends to lower it in the eyes of the boys. 
The ideals are essentially unintellectual. There is very little 
done positively to develop this enthusiasm among the boys; 
while the widespread interest in sport and games, and the un- 
questioned ascendancy which these have as standards of ex- 
cellence and distinction among the boys, go far to repress still 
more any claim of prestige on the part of the intellectual pur- 
suits. I am the last to ignore the inestimable value of athletic 

^ One of my colleagues was talking to a German professor on the 
difference between England and Germany. The Herr Professor 
asked: "In England you have no class of learned men, have you?" 
"O yes," replied my friend, "we have." "But how do you call 
them? " " Wiy nennen sie 'prigs,' " was his reply. 

12 — 2 



1 90 Appendix II 

games in the development of English character, but I quote it 
here in its negative effects upon popular estimation of science. 
As the games act at school, so, in later Ufe, the ascendancy of 
politics over other liberal vocations acts in the same way. Not 
only that the interest which attaches to political activity is 
supreme and is conducive to prestige, and that, in so far, it 
draws heavily on the rising talent, which might in other coun- 
tries be directed towards scientific pursuits; but, at the same 
time, and, perhaps, because of this, it tends to lower the stand- 
ing of scientific men as a body or class. 

But there seems to me a more direct, though less evident, 
cause for this want of appreciation and enthusiasm. It is to be 
found in the prize-system of schools and universities. The num- 
ber of prizes and scholarships existing in the schools and uni- 
versities of England is quite unparalleled in any other country. 
They have long since drifted far away from the original purpose 
of supporting the studies of those who are in actual need, and 
they have, in the first instance, been only used as means of 
creating more intense emulation and competition. The 
"scholars" of our great public schools and of many of the 
colleges in our universities are far from being the children of 
poor parents; and, though many may not be rich, still I ven- 
ture to say that there is but a very small proportion who are in 
dire need of such support. It has gone so far, that schools and 
colleges, perhaps unconsciously, and not directly and avowedly, 
seem to bid against one another for talented candidates for 
instruction; and that these candidates themselves, even at an 
early age, are put in a position of choosing the highest bidder, 
and of recognizing their own value in accepting — the great boon 
of being allowed to learn. 

The result is that, at a very early age, the enthusiasm is not 
only not awakened, but is stunted in its growth or entirely 
eradicated. The boy and the young man have enforced upon 
them the recognition that the act of learning is to be paid for 
and has its market value. The result again is (as I have been 
able to appreciate by comparison with students of other coun- 
tries), that, in spite of the excellent men we breed in these homes 
of learning, there is a comparative want of enthusiasm among 



Science and Empiricism, Theory and Practice 191 

them, an absence of that deep gratitude which glows in the eyes 
and comes from the heart of the students I have seen in Ger- 
man}'' and America and in Scotland at being allowed to drink 
in information at the very fountain-head. I feel a general 
bluntness which can best be expressed by the French word 
blase. 

This I ascribe entirely to the system of scholarships as it now 
exists. I will not here refer to the material disadvantages of this 
system, when we consider how large a proportion of the incomes 
of our schools and universities (now cramped for means of 
developing their teaching) are devoted to this fungus growth in 
the fields of charity running to seed. But I will finally point to 
the further harmful influence of this condition as affecting the 
parents, and, through them, the general interest in science on 
the part of the people. With a large number of those who have 
benefited by such subvention, it has robbed them of the whole- 
some feeling of sacrifice which they would otherwise make to 
secure the advantages of education for their children; and it 
has caused them, as it did the boys themselves, to look upon 
education, not as a privilege, but as a matter the acceptance of 
which requires pay as an inducement. In so far their minds 
have been diverted from the end of education as a thing of 
supreme value in itself, and, in consequence, they can never 
rise into the pure and abstract regions where learning and science 
are spiritual goods which have their standard and value in 
themselves. 



NOTE D 

(O. C. pp. 126 seq.) 

I have been told by manufacturers and repre- 
Dangers to sentatives of technical industries abroad that 
n us yy England was losing the supremacy which natural 

Empiricism, advantages (such as coal and minerals) and prac- 
tical ingenuity had given her in the past; while 
countries like Germany, Switzerland, and even Italy, were mak- 
ing rapid advances. I believe this is chiefly due to the fact that 



192 Appendix II 

England is too much bound down by empiricism. Empiricism is 
a very good thing, and produces excellent results where there is 
great wealth of natural resources, and unhampered opportunities 
without the pressure of time in active competition. Could we 
each of us live through many lives and generations for a thou- 
sand years with our eyes and ears open, we might gain experi- 
ence and wisdom more effectively than is conveyed to us by 
much teaching and much reading. But when the natural 
resources dwindle, and the pressure of time grows, when we are 
pressed out of the favourable position of easy monopoly into 
one of severe competition, empiricism will not suf&ce to secure 
the retention of our advantage. Then practice must be strength- 
ened, advanced, and hastened in its advance, by well matured 
and applied theory. I would almost like to venture upon a 
comprehensive aphorism, and to say: that progress in civiliza- 
tion means the closer approximation between theory and 
practice, law and conduct. And I believe that the stress in this 
approximation is not to be put upon the modification of theory 
in accordance with practice; but, rather, in the directness, 
vividness, and facility with which practice makes use of, and is 
effected by, theory. " Technical Schools " of a popular character 
are not the panacea to our industrial ailments. The best chemist 
for a specific manufactory, the most versatile mechanic, the 
most thorough, and, in so far, the most efficient electrician for 
industrial purposes, the physician and practitioner who is least 
likely to be baffled by turns in diseases that diverge from the 
ordinary course, are not those who have been trained " techni- 
cally" and empirically for the immediate tasks which their 
craft is supposed to lay upon them ; but they have come from a 
university (and this is generally the case in German factories) 
where they have learnt the fundamental principles of their 
science and of all science; where, for a time, they have concen- 
trated all their faculties upon the task of grasping the very core 
and essence of their branch of study in theory. At all events, 
such a man has gained the scientific spirit, which for him will 
mean (when he has turned to active pursuits) the greatest power 
to overcome the immediate checks to his plans or experiments, 
to go deeper down to the fundamerctal causes of failures and 



Science and Empiricism, Theory and Practice 1 93 

successes in the phenomena he produces, induces, or which 
present themselves to him, and hence to multiply and vary his 
resources and devices — to apply his own hard common sense, 
supported by the very principles of things and by common sense 
of innumerable people before him. This is the case in Germany; 
but it is not universally the case in England. 



Reprinted from The Journal of Education, June, 1916. 



APPENDIX III. 

EDUCATIONAL REFORM 

A MOST important issue has been raised by the two manifestos 
published in The Times of May 4 — the one by Sir E. Ray Lan- 
kester's Committee, the other by a number of representative 
men of learning and culture, including some specialists of the 
natural sciences. The proposals they contain are vital to our 
national life, in the present and for the future. A false step, 
a hasty reform, or a complete revolution of our educational 
system, might prove fatal to our. national life for generations 
to come. But the opinions expressed by both parties are in no 
way unreasonable or extreme, and can surely be reconciled. Is 
it too much to hope that the two bodies will meet and co- 
operate, and, if possible, found a great Educational Reform 
League to improve our national education? Would it not be 
possible for them, thus united, to seek for and to confirm — not 
the differences in their views — which have already been abun- 
dantly formulated, but the points of agreement which they 
could bring before the administrative authorities with weight 
of influence ensuring practical realization ? 

If Sir E. Ray Lankester's Committee were to succeed in 
securing more complete recognition for the study of modern 
languages and, especially, for instruction in the principles and 
achievements of the natural sciences, they will have done a 
great service to the nation. On the other hand, they must 
effectually guard against the fatal misconception in the teaching 
of these subjects — a misconception which is almost inevitable, 
if not in their own case, at all events among the wider public — 
that they are to be taught with a view to producing the 
specialist or technical journeyman. The wider teaching of 
science must be humanistic in nature, in which even the most 
technical and utilitarian studies are ultimately — and even im- 
mediately — pursued in what we must call the humanistic spirit. 



Educational Reform 195 

The aims of such teaching are to be the training of thought and 
taste, the development and refinement of the sense of truth, the 
increase of knowledge; they are not to be affected by the 
premature introduction of "applied" and opportunistic ends. 
We must all admit that no man is properly educated (may 
I use the word "cultured"?) whatever his classical, historical, 
literary, or artistic attainments, who has not imbibed the spirit 
of modern science and has not some acquaintance with its 
achievements. 

It is not enough to know Shakespeare; we must also know 
Newton if we claim to have grasped the history and meaning 
of English civilization. On the other hand, from the point of 
view of national education, it must be admitted that the 
Principia are not to the same degree accessible and intelligible 
to all people as are the works of Shakespeare, because they only 
represent one aspect of human life — its thought and its needs — 
while Shakespeare covers the wholeness of human life; the 
subject-matter and the language necessarily appeal to all, and 
his work thus forms part of what have justly been called the 
humanistic studies. In the case of Hellenic or classical literature, 
this applies to all Western nations. The classics will thus always 
form the 'groundwork of general education. 

No man recognized this more fully than the late A. W. v. 
Hoffmann, the great scientific chemist of the past generation of 
German educationists, who helped to lay the foundation of that 
purely scientific organization which has been applied to German 
industries, and even to the conduct of war. In his Rectorial 
Address at the University of Berlin, delivered many years 
ago, he maintained with great clearness of conviction and ex- 
position that the classical education in the Gymnasia of the 
Germany of old was ultimately productive of higher standards 
of scientific research and achievement, and immediately of 
better men to further its ends, than the teaching of what we 
call "the modern side," The result of the spirit of his teaching 
and of that of his scientific colleagues (to adhere to only the 
one instance of Hoffmann's work) has been that the aniline 
industry (though discovered in England by Perkin, under whom 
Hoffmann worked) has been monopolized by Germany, The 



196 Appendix III 

three factories which thus control that industry (at Mannheim, 
Hoechst, and Elberfeld), besides their armies of workmen, have 
each about 350 highly trained scientific chemists, most of them 
educated in the purest spirit of their science in universities, and 
not in technical schools. One hundred of these may be occupied 
in direct supervision and management, while two hundred are 
engaged in more remote chemical research in the same spirit 
and with the same methods as prevail in higher research in 
universities. I am, on the other hand, told that the largest 
chemical works in the United Kingdom employ at most ten 
highly trained chemists. 

Now what does this mean? Not that 350 highly trained 
chemists flocked to the doors of the factory to dump their un- 
solicited intellectual merchandise before ignorant and recalci- 
trant employers, but that these employers — and the nation at 
large — ^were sufficiently well educated to realize the advantage 
of pure science and research; that they called for such scientific 
assistance, and gradually developed their extensive research 
laboratories, which ultimately were turned to such enormous 
commercial profit. It certainly does not mean that we ought 
to concentrate our energies on the technical training of chemical 
or other scientific journeymen, but that, as a nation, we must 
fight what Meredith called " England's hatred of thought " — 
the general mistrust of the expert. We must not listen to the 
clamour of the popular sciolist, that we ought to level science 
and education down to the needs of our industrial and com- 
mercial life, but we must raise the nation up to the under- 
standing and appreciation of the highest science, even the 
abstract and humanistic aspect of it. This will lead to thorough- 
ness in its application to the varied needs of the nation and of 
its economic life. 

One truth it is, however, most important for us to remember 
at the present moment : 

That the success attained by Germany in its industrial and com- 
mercial development during the last forty years, as well as in its 
preparation for this War, and where it has been legitimately successful 
in the waging of it, is entirely due to the infusion of the spirit of 
thoroughness into the whole German nation by such men of th§ 



Educational Reform 197 

previous generation as v. Hoffmann, by Virchow and Helmholtz, 
Gauss, Kirchiiof, and Bunsen, and innumerable representatives of 
humanistic studies kindred in spirit with these; that these men were 
all trained in "classical" schools; and that this humanistic spirit of 
those former days, affecting the hfe of the whole nation, was again 
the inheritance of the thought derived from their philosophic pre- 
decessors, such as Kant, Fichte, ScheUing, Hegel. Out of this in- 
herited earher spirit has come the thoroughness and the appreciation 
of scientific organization in the functions of the government, as well 
as the appreciation of things of the mind on the part of the whole 
people. I have endeavoured to show elsewhere how this monstrous 
War is the result of the rise and dominance of Strehertum, the victory 
of the modem "pusher," the very antithesis of the traditions of the 
older Germany. I maintained that, in so far as the older spirit has 
survived, Germany are successful, and that all that is bad and leads to 
their ultimate undoing, as it has already produced the moral de- 
generation of the German people, is due to the new AlldeutscJies 
Strebertum. 

It is in the nature of these hasty, intellectual parvenus to 
exaggerate the importance of the application of science to 
military organization. By a curious paradox they become the 
pedants who build up theories of national psychology, and 
imagine that systematic frightfulness will overcome the nerve 
of highly intelligent, as well as healthy and sturdy, enemies. 
It is they who place their chief hope on Zeppelins and sub- 
marines and on superior railway organization. On the other 
hand, the War will be won by the Allies the more rapidly as 
they increase the thorough and scientific organization of the 
business of war, while retaining the moral qualities Avhich, as 
nations, they possess. We must free ourselves from the mis- 
trust or the neglect of the expert which leads our Government 
to assign skilled work to unskilled amateurs, and produces 
instances such as that quoted by Lord Montagu — ^instances 
which can be multipHed a hundredfold. But we must go deeper 
and wider than this until we come to the prevalent ideals of 
education, where, with the exception of the Scottish people 
(whose appreciation of thought and learning is comparatively 
high), the general value placed upon intellectual achievement 
and eminence is of the lowest. So long as the nation at large 



198 Appendix III 

(from the governing classes, through the employers of labour 
and the labourers themselves) does not justly appreciate such 
moral values, there is little hope of improvement. But, above 
all, when the parents in their homes — ^however priceless our 
national sports are to us — prefer their sons to gain distinction 
in the world of sport or in social eminence rather than as able 
scholars, and even encourage contempt for intellectual achieve- 
ments, the best educational systems and the efforts of all our 
pedagogues will be in vain. And yet, recognizing the crying 
need for reform in the teaching and efficient diffusion of culture 
and of science, let us always retain our national ideals of man- 
hood as conveyed by the term" gentleman " — the man possessed 
of culture, including the understanding and the appreciation of 
the natural sciences as well as the humanities, the man de- 
lighting in our sports and our outdoor life, with the accom- 
panying spirit of fair-play, chivalry, and generous manliness. 
For " the man's the gowd for a' that " — and it's the man who 
wins wars. 



Reprinted from Harper's Weekly, Aug. i6, 1890. 



APPENDIX IV. 

MODESTY 

My friend J. R. is one of the profoundest thinkers I have ever 
met. He has done more original research in his own hne of 
work, has contributed more to widen the sphere of the known, 
to fix and define and complete what was before but imperfectly 
known, than any man in England. Besides this, he is a most 
widely read and accomplished man, full of attainments which 
make life interesting and profitable, appreciative not only of 
everything that is great and beautiful and good, but even of 
what is pretty and graceful and amusing. These attainments 
that others consciously strive for, and when possessed after 
much effort are always aware of, were part of his whole nature, 
and seemed to be spontaneous outpourings of his personality. 
With him the answer to the question " Can you play the violin ? " 
— " I do not know; I have never tried " — almost lost its humor- 
ous point, for really it looked as if he might have done every- 
thing he desired to do, if only he tried it. 

With all this he is the man of the most healthful modesty, 
free from all shyness and free from all pride. He is free from 
shyness, on the one hand, because he is intellectually (and 
perhaps, therefore, also emotionally) free from selfishness, be- 
cause he is not thinking always of himself and the way he may 
strike others or the way they may treat him, and is interested 
in and engrossed by the people he meets and the things he is 
discussing or contemplating. On the other hand, he is not 
proud, because his standard of self-estimation is not based upon 
a comparison of his own merits and advantages with those of 
others, and he is thus not aware of or interested in the superi- 
ority he may possess over others ; nor is he diffident from con- 
stantly looking for and discovering points of inferiority in him- 
self as compared with his neighbour. He has no such vacillating, 



aoo Appendix IV 

mean, and unhealthy standards. His standards for judging 
other people, or for appreciating work and things, are outside 
himself, free from egotistical bias; his standards for judging 
himself are within himself, in the ideals of perfection or per- 
fectibility, which stimulate his every effort, and are the grounds 
for self-commendation or esteem, or self-distrust or reproof. 

I have never met a man so free from envy or jealousy, so 
joyously upraised by the discovery of virtue or skill or strength 
in other men, of beauty and goodness and brilliancy in women, 
of merit and genius in work. Nay, this extends to a natural 
faculty for discovering a humorous point in a simple tale, or a 
humble incident, of seeing quaintness in an object approaching 
the grotesque, of finding fun in a mishap that would otherwise 
sour the temper of a whole party. His appreciation of nature is 
marked by the same healthful unselfishness. He cannot under- 
stand the narrowness of appreciation of those who grumble at 
a flat country because they like mountains. His catholicity of 
taste leads him to say : " Give me a hayrick and a hedge and a 
bit of green turf on the roadside, with a purplish or buff 
ploughed field beyond, a bit of sunlight, a bit of blue haze, a 
cloud or two, and the delight in its way is as great as when the 
Matterhorn at sunset fills one's soul with awe," 

The same charitable disposition (really charitable, because 
it is unconscious of its charity or of any attribute of itself) per- 
■ vades his treatment of other men. He somehow or other cannot 
help seeing a good or interesting point in people in whom we 
only saw what is bad or dull ; and to these points he would cling 
in dealing with them or thinking of them. And thus he had 
friends and friendly acquaintances among all manner of men, 
even among those of whom many of us disapproved : the brain- 
less riding man ("rattling good sort, straight sporty fellow, a 
jolly plucky man, that!"); the priggish sulky learned man 
("X was quite talkative this evening, he is really doing first- 
class work, his is the real stuff") ; the smuggish bore (" I hardly 
know a purer-hearted man than Y; he has got rid of that 
beastly tie and looked quite a swell to-day") — he found some- 
thing nice in them all, and they really became good fellows 
when with him ; he would not give them an opportunity to show 



Modesty 201 

their disagreeable side. I remember one day finding him in one 
of his moods of deepest blues. These generally came when his 
numerous occupations and duties grew too much for him ; when, 
with a hopeless accumulation of things he felt he ought to do, 
he sat in almost despair, folding his hands and feeling that he 
could do nothing at all. Sometimes a jar upon his sensitiveness, 
something "ugly and base" would strike the keynote and 
throw him into this dismal mood for days. Not unfrequently 
this oppression of work was caused by the fact that his social 
disposition and his power of attracting people preyed upon 
his time and energy to such an extent that his work 
would suffer by it. He would then, in this frame of morbid 
relaxation, burst forth in a fit of bitter self-depreciation, gibe 
at himself, his self-indulgence, want of method, and general 
good-for-no thingness. Toward the end of one of these fits, he 
suddenly turned upon me, one day, and said: "Smith said 
something to me and about me the other day which pleased me 
more than I can tell you. I wonder whether it is true? If it is, 
I have some reason, after all, to be satisfied with myself. You 
know, we have been great friends for years, but have not seen 
much of each other for some time. He came up to stay with me 
last week, and we compared notes of our past selves as if we 
were dead. 'One thing of you has remained foremost in my 
mind,' he said. 'You always make people show their best side 
to you. A man can't be a brute when being with you or thinking 
of you. And they do this without coquetry, or lying, until 
gradually that nicer side may grow biggest m them.' That 
would indeed be a splendid quality to possess. I Wonder 
whether I really have it? Perhaps I have." 

He had a favourite parable which he found somewhere in 
Goethe. He used to quote it not only because of its contents, 
but because he considered it a model of the literary form of 
parable, namely, one in which the truth conveyed was pithily 
couched in the very strongest contrasts — in this case, pure 
beauty and the putrefying carcass of a dog. It ran: "And the 
Lord was walking with his disciples. And they came upon the 
carcass of a dog which was rotting in the sun. And one disciple 
held his eyes and said, ' What a sight ! ' And the other held his 



202 Appendix IV 

nose and said, 'What a stench!' And the Lord spake, 'The 
teeth are white as pearls \'" 

I am afraid that I may have given the impression that my 
friend was a prig. This would be absolutely wrong. He had 
nothing of the sermonizer about him, and only dwelt upon these 
more serious moral considerations when with intimate friends 
or when the surrounding circumstances called for serious treat- 
ment. His definition of prig is most characteristic. Prig and 
snob he maintained to be supplementary ideas. A prig, ac- 
cording to him, was in the intellectual sphere what a snob was 
in the social sphere. I remember the interesting discussion we 
had that evening which brought out his definition. It was at 
the house of a very brilliant lady in London. We were discussing 
one of the great writers of the day, when someone said, quite 
lightly, "I think him a siiob." We all felt a shock; and I over- 
heard our hostess turning to our friend and saying "Have 
you not always had a sneaking feehng that in applying that 
word to any person you were something of it yourself? " There 
was some danger of an embarrassed lull spreading over the 
whole company. My friend's tact led him to the rescue. He 
diverted the disturbing personal element into impersonal and 
general channels, in recalling Thackeray's definition of a snob 
and criticizing it. When pressed to attempt at defining a snob 
himself, he pointed to the fact that snob and prig explained one 
another, and defined a snob as " a person who was manifestly 
and obtrusively conscious of his social advantages or disadvan- 
tages ; a prig was the same in the sphere of intellect and morals." 
A duke, or even a king, who was thus manifestly conscious of 
his social advantage, and showed it in his actions and bearing, 
was a snob, as much as a cobbler who thus manifested his social 
deficiency. The browbeating professor, who flaunts his superior 
knowledge in the face of all poor laymen, conscious of his 
learning, is as much of a prig as the famulus Wagner who is 
melting with his own ignorance in the light of his learned master 
Faust. And the little Jack Horner, very good boy, who is so 
constantly eating the plum of moral self-gratulation with sticky 
fingers, is as much of a prig as the humble " sinner " whose back 
is fairly broken under the weight of sins which he acknowledges 



Modesty 203 

himself to have the merit of carrying. "I cannot stand the 
intellectually or morally nouveau riche," I have heard him say; 
"he is as bad and as self-assertive as the shoddy is in the social 
sphere." Good-breeding is good-breeding because it is and does 
. not know it ; and brains and heart are most there when they do 
not show their anatomy. It is only in disease or post-mortems 
that brains and hearts are worth studying as such. His type of 
a snob and a prig combined was the young Duke in Browning's 
Flight of the Duchess : 

For what the old Duke was without knowing it. 

The young Duke fain would know that he was without being it. 

No, my friend was certainly not the prig or the good boy. 
He was very demonstrative of his displeasure when he felt it, 
and expressed it in strong language. Nor did his modesty pre- 
vent him from "jumping upon" people when he was convinced 
that they deserved it. He was once on a scientific commission 
which had met to decide some points that were much discussed 
at the time. At the first meeting he felt strongly that, whereas 
some definite questions could ef&ciently be studied and decided 
upon by the commission, there were the wider, general questions 
which did not admit of a final and direct solution by anybody at 
that time. He therefore moved a restriction of the ground to be 
covered, confessing that he was not able to form a satisfactory 
opinion owing to the absence of data for the formation of such 
an opinion. This ignorance he entirely ascribed to himself. But 
when one member of the commission, a man holding a great 
position in the world, and who (as my friend afterwards con- 
fessed to me) really knew less about the question in hand than 
he did, began patronizingly to assure him that he and other 
members would provide him with facts, his patience gave way, 
and, walking to the other end of the long table, he put his hand 
on the distinguished man's shoulder and said: "When I said 
that I did not know enough of the subject, I did not mean to 
imply that you did ; my ignorance does not produce your know- 
ledge; nor, gentlemen (turning to the whole assembly), do I 
mean to imply that any one of you here present, or any other 
body of men, is capable of deciding this question at the present 

W.T. 13 



204 Appendix IV 

state of the facts." He was greeted with applause and carried 
his point. 

He loved to see " cocksureness " rebuked, and delighted in the 
snub which the late master of Trinity gave a dogmatic young 
man when he summed up the youthful orator's tirade: "Yes, 
we are none of us infallible, not even the youngest among us." 
On the other hand, no one irritated him as much at certain 
meetings, and led him to the use of such strong language, as a 
very distinguished and reverend scholar, who mth a humility 
that was in bad taste, if not disingenuous, would always preface 
his remarks mth phrases such as, " though I know less about 
this matter than y<ou all here do," " though I have absolutely no 
right to an opinion" (though he was called upon by duty and 
position to have one), etc., etc. He often chuckled over "dear 
old B's" dogmatic rudeness. B was an old German professor, 
facile princeps in his own line of work. He w^ould constantly 
confess that he had not given sufficient attention to one or the 
other departments of his study, and would listen with genuine 
interest and avidity of learning to what a younger member of 
his guild had to tell him. Scholars in the same branch passing 
through his university town, which lies in a much frequented 
district, would often meet there when setting out upon or re- 
turning from their holiday trip. In the evening all would meet 
at a beer-garden, and, under the presidency of old B there was 
much interesting " shop " talked. On one occasion, among the 
people thus assembled, was a very aggressive younger German 
professor, who, in a loud voice and a very disagreeable, thump- 
ing manner, was laying down the law. All present were much 
irritated with him, but it apparently had not yet moved the 
equanimity of mild old B. At last the rude young prig was 
holding forth loudly on a matter which happened to be a 
question of argument and not of fact, so that a discussion could 
well be maintained on his side. But his manner was so offensive 
that it roused even the modest old B. Turning round to the 
young professor, from the head of the table where he sat, he, 
with almost exaggerated quiet and solemnity, raised his fore- 
finger, which was long and bony, and, slowly waving it in 
pendulum fashion to and fro before the speaker's face, he said. 



Modesty 205 

quietly and solemnly: " Nein, Herr Professor, das ist nicht so" 
(No, Professor, that is not so) . The argument was closed ; there 
was nothing more to say, and nothing more was said, though 
there was much to be said. It was the only time modest old B 
had ever been seen dogmatic, the only time he seemed aware 
and conscious of his own dignity, and seemed to be resting his 
claim upon the works he had written so long ago, and to speak 
ex cathedra whence he had taught generations of scholars. It was 
the justified revolt of true modesty stung by arrogance. 

Some time ago there came into our circle a very remarkable 
man, who was preceded by a reputation of extraordinary ability. 
He was tall and strong and dark, and of very striking appear- 
ance. The extent of his knowledge on aU manner of subjects 
was phenomenal. He had travelled a great deal, seen and known 
all manner of people, had read widely and extensively, and 
astonished us all with his intimate familiarity with out-of-the- 
way facts of history and literature, of art and craft, of peoples 
and countries. He spoke in a quiet way, with great succinctness 
and directness, and did not hesitate to correct the slips of those 
who spoke vaguely or inaccurately on subjects. My friend was 
at once deeply impressed by him. " I have never met anybody 
like him. He makes me feel like mud. He does teach one 
humility. He makes me feel what a humbug I am. There I am 
skulking and sneaking through the world of thought with a 
pitiable, small, mean capital of facts and accurate knowledge, 
always drawing and overdrawing my poor account of facts to 
launch out into the greatest spheres of thought and speculation, 
living from hand to mouth, forced to refer to a book for the 
simplest, commonest fact, and that man has it all there, neatly 
stored away in his brain, ready to be referred to whether walking 
in the street, or smoking in a club, or chatting with a lady in a 
drawing-room. Do not tell me that this stupendous memory 
and wealth of facts are purchased at the expense of speculative 
faculty. I tried that sneaking, ungenerous, behttling prop to 
my tottering vanity; he can think fully as well as we can, 
though he knows so much more than we do, you cannot cling 
even to this last straw of self-conciUation. No, he is a wonderful 
man; I admire him very much, and shall love him very soon." 

13—2 



2o6 Appendix IV^ 

This burst of admiration was very characteristic of him. But 
soon I found that he did not speak so much of this wonderful 
polyhistor; he avoided talking about him, and would not ex- 
press an opinion when he was discussed. One day at a dinner, 
when this wonderful man gave another evidence of unexpected, 
accurate knowledge, I was astonished to see our friend lean 
over, and, in his pleasant way, that made offence almost im- 
possible, say : " S, I shall like you quite the first time I hear you 
say ' I don't know.' " As we walked home that evening, I, mean- 
ing to draw him, referred to the remarkable instance of uni- 
versal information given by S that evening. "Well, I don't 
know," he simply said, "I have some vague memory of those 
facts, and I think he was quite out in his statement, though it 
was made with great weight and positiveness. I must look it 
up when I get back to my study." And when we arrived there, 
to smoke our last pipe before going to bed, he at once put his 
hand upon a fat volume, and, frowning, he said dryly, "Yes, 
I was quite right; S is quite out of it," 

From that day I noticed traces of irritation in our friend 
(very uncommon with him) whenever he was in the presence 
of the great S. Some months after this he rushed into my room 
one evening, and began to talk rapidly, walking up and down, 
as was his wont when excited, " I can't stand it — I am bursting 
with rage, I have had it pent up now for months, until my 
nerves are tingling with it. I have had it out with S like a 
stupid school-boy, and what I am especially sorry for is that 
I was rude to him in my own rooms. I wish I had not done it 
there: I have old-fashioned views on hospitality and such 
things. But, hang it, it was all true, deeply true, and I could 
not help saying it ! Please, my dear fellow, discount from the 
violence of diction of what I say now, I do not really mean it 
all so strongly; but it relieves me to shout it out, and I wish the 
world could hear it — for it is so true, so true, 

"You know how I began by admiring S for his wonderful 
information. But he soon puzzled me. I began to feel that he 
must be made quite differently from myself, was built on quite 
a different scale to feel things in so final a shape, to be so 
serene amidst the puzzling maze of^ things. I was quite pre- 



Modesty 207 

pared to look upon myself as an utter fool (fool that I was for 
doing so) until a slight circumstance gave me the first shock. 
I told him one day of a new German dissertation containing 
some interesting discoveries which I had just received, and 
gave him a short superficial account of its contents. I promised 
to lend it to him in a few days, when I could spare it. The very 
next day, by a curious chance, the subject dealt with in this 
dissertation was referred to in hall. After several of those 
present gave cautious views, S with that quiet, self-contained, 
and oracular finality, gave the few poor superficial facts I had 
told him as a weak summary of the German's work the day 
before, as a wonderful and striking ray of light amidst the 
tenebrous groping of hesitating opinion. The setting the words 
had on his lips, the conviction and maturity of personal as- 
similation, pointing to years of thought and experience which 
they seemed to possess from his personality, made it all sound 
so differently, that I doubted whether they really were the 
facts which I had cast before him in a hasty conversation the 
previous day. Now, there is nothing wrong in using information 
but recently acquired because its acquisition has been recent. 
But the tone in which this was conveyed was misleading; it 
pointed to an intimate acquaintance with the whole subject 
which I knew him not to possess; it promised so much more 
behind the mere words spoken. I received a shock which, for 
the first time, made me doubt him, and I could not help watch- 
ing for confirmation of my suspicions. From that moment 
I continually found him making assertions with that simple 
dignified assurance which were quite unfounded. I realized 
that his great effort was to hide his ignorance and to shine with 
his knowledge. He is eaten up by vanity, nurtured by the fatal 
frailty of his memory, and by the wonderment and admiration 
of the people whom he thus impresses, until it has become a 
powerful stimulus for which he craves like a drunkard, eating 
away the moral vitality and sensibility, which, from the traces 
which have not yet been obliterated, he must have possessed 
to a high degree. He has no reverence for the heroic effort it 
costs to master the whole truth; he cannot feel the great thrill 
of grasping her in one's arms in all her purity after one has 



2o8 Appendix IV 

fought one's way through the night and storm of doubt, the 
toils of puzzhng fallacies, and the enemies of light. Nay, it has 
gone farther and has eaten at his heart. He fears discovery, 
like an impostor, and as he deals lightly with facts and things, 
he deals lightly with human beings and their character. It 
sounded as captivating in its boldness and directness to hear 
him praise one man as the greatest of his kind, and condemn 
others as the worst and basest. Well, he had no justification 
for passing judgment upon people whose works and life he 
barely knew, using his personal impressiveness (itself a sham) 
to extol or demolish another man in the eyes of all who come 
within its influence. I hear that he praises me. I will not be 
praised by him; it is an insult to me. He is a bad man, whose 
judgment is guided by selfishness and vanity as much as is that 
of a child or a thoughtless girl. Were he either of these it would 
not strike me so. He came this evening really to ask for in- 
formation ; but he could not bring himself to ask it simply. His 
questions came in the form of information given to me. I could 
stand it no longer; my pent-up wrath burst out, and I told him 
how vicious I considered that habit of mind. 

"Oh, my dear fellow, how I hate it! How one ought to 
preach against it! We civilized Europeans feel the gulf of 
difference that lies between ourselves and the African savage, 
between our moral standards and those of the Oriental. Well, 
I say that those of us who have cultivated this sense of the 
sanctity of truth, and of the supreme claims of just thought, 
are different beings, live in a different moral world, from those 
whose sense in this direction is blunted or has remained in 
embryo. A sense is wanting in them, and that sense is funda- 
mental in its power of guiding us rightly in the complicated 
organization of our social life; it has become necessary to us, 
as cardinal a virtue, as the law against stealing and murdering 
was to a simpler and earlier stage of civilization. ^AHiy, we can 
divide educated society into two groups ; those who possess this 
virtue, and those who do not. 

" But what is most astonishing is the fact, how many people 
of refined moral sensibility there are among us who are entirely 
blunt as regards the appreciation of this cardinal virtue. They 



Modesty aoQ 

shrink with horror from any of the grosser vices, they refuse 
their hand to any person convicted of what they call lying, and 
they do not see that this is lying, the more dangerous and de- 
structive because not recognized as a vicious disease, under- 
mining the moral constitution of individuals, of classes, and of 
society. How often does a m.an distinguished in art or fiction or 
politics lay down the law upon some question of science, to 
which men with great initial power of thought have devoted 
their whole lives, and have learned caution and reverence in 
deciding upon important points. And there we all sit and listen, 
and but few are aware of the fact, and most would think it a 
gross exaggeration of terms if one pointed to the immoralit37- of 
such a proceeding, if one called it tying and impertinence. Nay, 
not in conversation only are these sins committed, but even in 
print; and as S uses his impressive personality to give weight 
to his unsound information, famous men use their reputation 
to commit this sin against the sanctity of truth and honest work. 

" How could you, my friend, live with a person whose whole 
scale of truthfulness and thought was absolutely different from 
yours? There would be no common language between you, 
there would really be no common moral basis, as little as there 
exists between an Arab chief and a refined English girl. You 
know I do not care for Blue-stockings, and that they do not 
attract me. But, my dear friend, never marry a fool or a woman 
whose intellectual sense of truth is not refined. Not only her 
power of reasoning, but her power of sympathy will be un- 
developed. She will never be able to ignore her desires when 
they are governed by her feeUng. There will be no ultimate 
judge to appeal to when feeling loses its correct bearings and is 
bedimmed or polluted by passion great or small. 

" And how can this great virtue be taught, or can it be taught 
at all? I believe it can in many ways, but especially in one. 
You know how I have always argued and fought against the 
current notion that the natural sciences could supplant and 
replace the study of the humanities. You know how I have 
argued against the predominance of the so-called useful pro- 
fessional studies, and in favour of the studies that aim, above 
all, at culture and refinement of taste. I have done this, even 



2IO Appendix IV 

running into the paradoxical. Well, now I wish to extol the 
natural sciences, and to accentuate their educational value. It 
is to them chiefly, and to their development and diffusion in 
modern times, that we owe this refinement of the sense of truth, 
theoretical and practical. I do not mean to attach so much 
importance to the acquisition of the rudiments of chemistry 
and physics, to the learning of formulas, to the familiarization 
of the chief results of natural history, of biology, and zoology. 
This I consider comparatively unimportant. But I wish all 
people at some period of their education, to learn and realize 
how, by what method, after what careful and conscientious 
process of induction, these general truths are arrived at. They 
are to read Darwin, that great life-work of a truly modest and 
charitable man, not so much to know what evolution is, or to 
speculate on the origin of species, but to learn, by personal, 
emotional experience, in living through another man's un- 
selfish work, how much careful weighing of numberless instances, 
and the elimination of the personal selfish desire to see things as 
one desires to see them, it requires before one is justified in 
expressing an opinion or even in forming one for one's self. 
A man or a woman who has realized this fully once in his or 
her life will be not only wider and of keener perception ever 
after, but will be morally improved, more just and charitable, 
more self-forgetful, and more helpful to others — they will be 
higher social beings. 

"O Sancta Modestia, Filia Veritatis.. . .You see, I must talk 
Latin; we have no word to convey the idea of this gracious 
virtue. The prurient people have robbed the noble word 
modesty from us, and have restricted, lowered and weakened 
its meaning." 

I have but very inadequately given what my friend said that 
evening. All his eloquence has been lost in my transcription, 
and the surroundings, the milieu of his panegyric of modesty, 
I cannot at all render. The quiet of the college court at mid- 
night, the scholastic and still modern sense of seclusion of the 
college rooms, the friend with face lighted up as by inspiration, 
his head bent forward as if in eagerness to convey the whole 
truth, while he paced up and down, occasionally pausing when 



Modesty 2ii 

he felt the truth coming to him — the absence of all this must 
diminish the impressiveness of my account. 

It became quite a turning-point in my own way of looking at 
things and people. I traced it everywhere, felt the beauty of its 
presence, and the ugliness and distress where it was not. 

No, we have not now one word that conveys this simple virtue 
fully and adequately. The French have modestie, and the Ger- 
mans have Bescheidenheit; but our word modesty has lost its 
original strength; it has been narrowed down and weakened 
into one special groove of meaning, until it corresponds more 
to the French word pudeur, the German Schamgefuhl and seems 
to do duty for the words chastity and purity, or sense of shame, 
the meanings of which it is meant to convey in a weakened and 
raore acceptable form. 

There seems to be a constant direction of change in the his- 
tory of words amounting almost to what might be called a law. 
They seem to lose their strength, and their keen edge of meaning 
with use. They either become vulgarized, or caricatured, or 
modified into social levity, and when once they have thus de- 
generated they lie fallov/ for a long time, until occasionally, 
when the commonness of over-use or abuse has died out of 
memory, they may be revived, as an archaic term by some 
writer of literary note, and then resume their pristine strength 
of meaning. 

There are many causes for this process of degeneration of 
words. One very powerful cause is the tendency towards 
euphemism — towards softening down meanings that may be 
shocking to tender sensibilities or unpleasant in their asso- 
ciations. Then a word of Idndred meaning is taken from 
another sphere, becomes fixed by use to this indirect meaning, 
and in its turn loses its early strength of significance. Chastity 
and purity appeared too strong for ordinary social use, and 
thus modesty has been more and more employed to convey this 
narrow or weaker meaning of delicacy of thought and manners. 
But we want its original strength back to designate the cardinal 
virtue my friend valued so highly. 

The modest man and the modest woman are those who 
possess the true humility of heart and mind which lies midway 



213 Appendix IV 

between arrogance and aggressive assurance on the one hand 
and mock-humihty and morbid dif&dence on the other. The 
modest man is the one who takes the true and just estimate of 
himself and of his views and opinions, and hves and speaks 
up to the standard of this just estimate, neither above nor below 
it. But the difficult question is that of determining what is this 
just estimate. Well, it is not to be found in the unsound com- 
parison of one's self with others, but lies in the fullest conception 
of all the faculties that are imperfect in one's self — in the ideal 
of one's own best powers. Whoever holds such higher views of 
a possible self before him will be humble of his own attainments 
on the one hand, and dignified in the self-dependence which 
admits of no pharisaical self-gratulation or servile self-oblitera- 
tion on the other. And so with thoughts and convictions and 
opinions which will be judged of by the divine ideals of know- 
ledge and of goodness. 

But it is still safer to keep these ideals before one's eyes and 
not to waste one's energies in looking inward too much. Our 
own importance is never very great, and is most likely to make 
itself felt in its fullest power the more we merge all the energies 
its contemplation might consume into the struggle for the 
attainment of what is highest and best. 

What does it all mean, and what have I meant by writing 
this? I mean to show the importance of intellectual honesty 
practised continuously and constantly, even in the smallest 
everyday occurrence, until it becomes a necessary habit of 
mind, a natural instinct, a moving or guiding power to every 
beat of our heart. It is true "the good heart" is at the bottom 
of even our most superficial virtue or social grace. But what 
I wish to accentuate here is the educational importance of this 
intellectual modesty in forming or maintaining the good heart. 
The old-fashioned Biblical term, "the bad heart," means pride, 
and pride is want of true modesty, and modesty we learn when 
we realize fully how hard it is to grasp truth, and how careful 
we must be in allowing ourselves to form an opinion. 



- Reprinted from The Nineteenth Century and After, Jan. 1919. 



APPENDIX V. 

THE KAISER AND *' THE WILL TO..." 

The Need for Universal Reconstruction of Morals. 

I 

One of the minor manifestations of the prevailing Teutonic 
spirit which led to this War is to be found in the invention of a 
comparatively new phrase and its constant use by those who 
were directly responsible for the War in the period preceding 
its outbreak and throughout the whole of its duration. 

The phrases— "the Will to Deeds" {der Wille zur Tat), "the 
Will to iVIight," "the Will to Victory," "the Will to Unity," 
even " the Will to Defeat," or, as ascribed to their enemies, " the 
Will to Destruction," occurred in nearly every pronouncement 
or speech made by the Kaiser, his statesmen and generals since 
1907 The constant reiteration of such phrases and what they 
imply, and their continuous repercussion upon the ear of the 
public, not only of the German people, but of their enemies and 
of neutrals, have so thoroughly familiarised the world with this 
unusual and illogical phrase (which, moreover, runs counter to 
the vernacular character of the German as well as of the English 
language), that similar phrases have found their way into our 
own language in these latter days or, at least, into that in- 
sidiously dangerous and demoralising sphere of our language, 
the "Journalese." 

A critical investigation of the meaning, origin and import of 
these phrases will repay some attention ; and will not only throw 
light upon the origin and conduct of this monstrously irrational 
and immoral War, but also upon the all-important problem of 
the future reconstruction of civilised society, far be3^ond the 
ordinary weight which we might attach to a mere phrase. 

That before our days the use of the word "will" in an ab- 
stract, almost cosmical, significance, beyond its designation of 
one of the several faculties of the human mind, is contrary to 
the significance attached to it in ordinary vernacular, will 



214 Appendix V 

hardly be disputed. Still less usual, and still more contrary to 
the spirit of our thought and language, is its use as a substan- 
tive, with the preposition " to " immediately governing another 
substantive, though the substantive may imply some form of 
activity. 

The form in which it has hitherto been used — and rightly 
used — is to govern some verb expressive of the definite activity 
arising out of the will or directed by it. We thus have a will to 
act, to rest, to work, to play, to fight, to give in, etc. It clearly 
denotes that one of our several faculties is directed towards a 
definite action; the more definite and individual the action, the 
more clearly does this human power manifest its nature and 
strength and the clearer is the meaning conveyed; the vaguer 
and more confused, general and abstract, the less clear becomes 
the meaning to be conveyed, until it ends in nonsense. Thus we 
may have a will to fight, and we generally do fight to win ; but 
we do not add to the clearness of expression by maintaining 
that we are generally moved by the "will to victory." The 
phrase may imply a whole world of activities and consequences 
and of implied meaning, and is either a platitude or a confused 
mystical suggestion clad in the garb of bombastic rhetoric. 
Still more is this the case when the German word "will" is not 
applied to the individual human mind, but to the collective 
mind of a whole nation. Even then this German phrase does 
not end there in its comprehensive pretentiousness. It connotes 
beyond and above the human mind — not the Divine will — but 
some kind of cosmical force infused into the world of nature 
and of mankind by human intelligence. It is thus raised to the 
dignity of a metaphysical principle, however much it may be 
flattened out and lowered down to the practical use of the 
market-place, the political stump speaker's platform, the 
barracks' drillyard and the world's battlefields. As a matter 
of fact, as we shall see, it thus has its primary, though more 
remote, origin in the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, the title of 
which is Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. 

In Schopenhauer's system the word "will" conveys the 
widely metaphysical meaning corresponding to force, to emotive 
power in some degree cognate to the .ancient Greek Hesiodic 



The Kaiser and " the Will to ... " 215 

conception of Eros or Love (not the later boy — Cupid), the 
oldest of gods, the force out of which the world grew. Still 
more remote and more vaguely influential was the Hegelian 
conception of the State as a fixed and final entity in the life of 
humanity, above reason and morality, which has to some 
degree led to the establishment by German publicists of their 
conception of the State and to the rule of German Politismus 
by publicists and political writers. At all events, whether 
vaguely suggested or clearly apprehended by those who have 
used this modern phrase, the suggestion of such an extra-human 
or cosmical conception is conveyed in their use of the term 
"will." 

Now we have always been aware of the importance of will 
and will-power, not only in the formation of perfect human 
character, but also in its effect upon achieving human design 
and purpose in the usual world of events and things about us. 
Will-power has always been and will ever remain one of the 
chief factors in human life. With some poetic license and in 
the form of epigrammatic exaggeration in order to impress our 
meaning, we have always insisted upon the power of the will to 
achieve whatever purpose it sets itself: "Where there's a will 
there's a way " is one of the oldest commonplaces in our lan- 
guage. The supreme importance of concentration of thought 
and action, of rapid resolution or continuous perseverance, of 
energy, and of conviction which underlies the concentrated 
energy to act — all these conceptions have been admitted and 
emphasised as principles guiding our life and as injunctions in 
the preparation for life in our education. Wordsworth praises 

The reason firm, the temperate will. 
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill. 

In our conception of will the human faculty is always co- 
ordinated with the other factors of human intellect and charac- 
ter. Above all, it is subordinated to the wider ethical and social 
elements of reason and morality. Will divorced from these is 
either mere animal instinct or passion. In civilised society we 
soon learn to respect the will of others while asserting our own 
independence, and both wills are subject to justice and truth. 



21 6 Appendix V 

However much we may respond to the will of others, this spirit 
of freedom and justice in us will never subject itself to arbitrari- 
ness or license on the part of others. In the words of Sir Henry 

Wotton: 

How happy is he born and taught 

That serveth not another's will. 
Whose armour is his honest thought 
And simple truth his utmost skill. 

In our civilised life the universally accepted principles of social 
morality, which underlie the individual will and the collective 
will of nations and of mankind, are based, not only upon reason 
and justice, but upon love or charity as well. The motive force 
in man, whether instinct or passion, energy or self-reaUsation, is 
inseparably interwoven with these principles, which act as the 
directing power to such vital energy. In the imaginary world we 
can only conceive of one sphere where reason and justice leave 
the will uncontrolled, and where love is replaced by hate, namely 
— in Hell. It is Lucifer who gives supremely beautiful expres- 
sion to the principles ruling his domain : 

What though the field be lost? 
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, 
And study of revenge, immortal hate. 
And courage never to submit or jdeld^. 

What governs the individual will also applies to the collective 
will of the State or Sovereign. In the States composed of free- 
men. Democracy, in the conception of tlie ancient Greeks and 
of the free people of our own times. 

Men their duties know. 
But know their rights, and knowing dare maintain. 

And sovereign law, that State's collected will. 

O'er thrones and globes elate, 

Sits empress, crowning good, repressing ill. 

(Sir William Jones.) 

But, in the sham-cosmical conception of will in the phrases as 
used by the Kaiser and his learned or unlearned henchmen, his 
own v/ill or the will of the State and the German nation is 

1 Paradise Lost, i. 105. 



The Kaiser and '' the Will to. . . '' 217 

divorced from reason, justice and charity, as the State and the 
sovereign are supreme and are raised above morahty. Might 
becomes right, and the "will to might" is the dominating prin- 
ciple of State action and of the citizens composing the State. 
These principles embody the latter-day system of morality 
dominating the political and social life of the German people, 
which led to this War and which established the barbarous 
methods by which it was carried on. They differ as much from 
the principles regulating the life of the older Germany as the 
ethics of Kant differ from those of Nietzsche. It required 
nearly fifty years for the Nietzschean ethics to percolate to 
such a degree through the moral consciousness of the German 
people, and for the German publicists, writers and teachers to 
pave the way for the Kaiser with his bureaucrats and militarists 
to advance to those heights of popular influence from which he 
could make the most definite practical application of these 
principles in order to lead Germany to world-dominion. 

In tracing the widespread introduction of these definite 
phrases, we are able to fix the exact date when, by supreme 
sanction of the Over-Lord, they are used as a watchword for the 
political regeneration of his people and for the establishment of 
Pan-Germanism throughout the world. The first time the 
Kaiser used such a phrase was in his Speech from the Throne 
at the opening of the Reichstag in February of 1907. His 
peroration ran thus: 

And now, gentlemen, may our national sentiment and our Will to 
Deeds {Wille zuv Tat), out of which this Reichstag has sprung, also 
dominate its work — for the salvation of Germany. 

When we recall the Willy-Nicky telegrams of 1904-5, the phrase 
might have run "Der Wille zum Tag" ! 

This is, as far as I can ascertain, the first time that the phrase 
was used in a public pronouncement. The Kaiser's use of the 
phrase is thus the first application of this more or less philo- 
sophical term for definite practical purposes in the political life 
of the German nation. The date 1907, when taken in connexion 
with the general trend of international politics of those days, is 
most significant. "The Day" {der Tag) was already a watch- 
word in the Army and Navy. From that time onwards it recurs 



21 8 Appendix V 

again and again in German political speeches, especially in 
reference to the foreign poHcy of the German nation and its 
need for expansion; until, during the period immediately pre- 
ceding the War, and also during the War, hardly any speech 
has been made by the civil and military authorities without the 
obtrusion of some reference to the "Will to war," "to victory," 
"to power," etc. 

We have already indicated by anticipation the source whence 
this form of expression, and the idea it conveys, are derived. 
Ultimately, it originates in the philosophical writings of 
Schopenhauer, combined with the theories of Hegel concerning 
the State, its nature, and its powers — especially in Schopen- 
hauer. But directly it owes its origin to Nietzsche, whose 
brilliant literary expositions as, perhaps, the greatest of German 
writers of passionate prose, effectually familiarised the wider 
public with the phrase and the ideas it conveys in every class 
of German society. 

The truth of this statement will be admitted by the German 
authorities themselves. Georg Biichmann, in his popular book 
Gefiugelte Worte (edition of 191 2), in dealing with the phrase 
" der Wille zuv Tat" (the Will to Deeds or to Action), says: 
"The forging of this term, first used in Nietzsche's Richard 
Wagner in Bayreuth (1876), was beyond all question influenced 
by Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung." As we 
maintained above, Schopenhauer's use of the term "will" and, 
even in its application to human life, the phrase "the Will to' 
Life" [der Wille zum Leben), partake more of an abstract and 
metaphysical significance. 

In Nietzsche, however, it is directly concerned with man's 
social and moral attitude towards his fellow-men, and aims at 
becoming a direct and fundamental guide to moral (or, rather, 
unmoral) human existence. With him the phrase is essentially 
connected with his theory of the Superman . This term, so much 
used of late years in every part of the world, did not originate 
with Nietzsche. In fact it goes back to the ancient Greek poets, 
to Homer and Hesiod and to Lucian, in whom the terms 
vTreprjvopioiv, vTreprjvoip and v7repdv6pa)7ros occur. In Seneca, we 
have the phrase "supra hominem est:" In German the term 



The Kaiser and the '' Will to ... " 219 

" Uebermensch," besides occurring in the writings of Hippel, 
Jean Paul, Grabbe, and others, is found in two famous passages 
in Goethe's Faust. Goethe probably derived his use of the 
term from Herder, who again borrowed it from the numerous 
theological writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nine- 
teenth centuries. These theological writers used the term in a 
very different — in fact, in an opposite, significance to that 
attached to it by Nietzsche. Thus in a Book of Devotions of 
the seventeenth century by Heinrich Miiller we read that "in 
the new man thou art a true man, a superman, a man of God, 
and a Christian man " {Im neuen Menschen hist Du ein wahrer 
Mensch, ein Ober-Mensch, ein Gottes- und Christen-Mensch). 
The term is used in various forms with the same significance in 
other devotional literature, once even as early as in a letter by 
the Saxon Dominican Hermann Rab, dated 1527, down to the 
nineteenth century. In this last instance it is even applied to 
the Saviour Himself in a book published anonymously in Berlin 
in 1807, "The Life of the Superman Jesus, the Christ, the Great 
Man from Palestine" {Lebenslauf des Ober-menschen Jesus des 
Christus des Grossen Mannes aus Paldstina). 

Now, Nietzsche's conception of the Superman is vastly 
different from that of these theological writers. To quote 
Buchmann's admirable summary^: 

The term Superman has only become a commonplace in the modern 
sense through Nietzsche, who sees in him a forceful being to whom 
nothing is good but what he wills and who overthrows ruthlessly 
whatsoever opposes him. No doubt the conception of "Rulers- 
morality" and of the "Blond Beast" was introduced by others. 
Nietzsche himself saw in the Superman only a higher ideal step made 
by humanity, which was thus to develop in the same degree as is 
found in the step from animal to man. In his most popular book. 
Also spvach Zavathustva (1883), he says: "I teach to you the Super- 
man. Man is something that must be overcome. All beings have 
hitherto created something above themselves; and you wish to re- 
main the ebb of this great flood-tide, and rather to return to the 
animal than to overcome man ? What is the ape to man ? Laughter 
and painful shame; and just so man is to be to the Superman — 
'laughter and painful shame.*" 

* Gefliigelte Worte, p. 262. 
w. T, 14 



220 Appendix V 

In spite of Biichmann's attempt to attribute to others the 
conception of "Rulers-morality" and of the "Blond Beast," he 
himself refers to the undoubted introduction of these terms by- 
Nietzsche in his Essay Beyond Good and Evil (1886), where he 
asserts that there exists " a morality for Rulers, and a Morality 
for Slaves" [Es gibt Herren-moral und Skla7)en-moral); and 
further maintains that "morality in Europe is to-day the 
morahty of herded animals" {Moral ist heute Herdentier -moral). 
Furthermore, in his Essay on the Genealogy of Morals (1887) 
(probably influenced by de Gobineau), he refers to the "need 
of all aristocratic races " to compensate themselves for the social 
constraint, which in times of Peace they must impose upon 
themselves, by means of cruelty to other races; and thus, as 
exulting monsters, to return to the innocence of the predatory 
animals {Raubtier Gewissen), as the glorious "Blond Beast," 
lustfully roaming about in search of prey and victory; and this 
term of the Blond Beast especially refers to the German nation 
as that of the Blond Germanic Beast {Blonde Germanische 
Bestie). Nietzsche's last literary effort, begun in 1886, and left 
unfinished, was posthumously published in 1895. I't bears the 
significant title "The Will to Power" {Der Wille zur Macht. 
Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte)'^. 

^ No doubt one of the most influential factors in familiarising the 
German people with the philosophy of Schopenhauer was the wide- 
spread popularity of Wagner's Music-dramas, especially The Ring 
of the Nibelungen. Wagner was, during the greater part of his life, 
a direct and convinced disciple of Schopenhauer, and consciously 
embodied the leading principles of his philosophy in his own artistic 
creations. The central figure of Siegfried ("who knew not what fear 
meant") as a personification of will-power, the only force which rules 
life, represents his conception of Schopenhauer's Will. How popu- 
larly-effective this artistic teaching has been is illustrated by the 
simple fact, that, after the Hindenburg-line, the chief remaining 
trench-lines of German defences were all named after these heroes of 
the "Blond Beast" as embodied in the Wagnerian rendering of 
Nordic mythology. In addition to the Siegfried-line were the Briin- 
hilde-line, the Hunding-hne, the Wotan-line, etc. It is true that in 
his later life the claims of Christian charity and humility were admit- 
ted by Wagner in the creation of the inartistic, undramatic and un- 
heroic figure of Parsifal. For the Reine^ Thar (the pure dolt, who 



The Kaiser and " the Will to ... " 22 1 

Now the influence of such doctrines upon the mentahty of 
the German people, who dehberately began this world-war, and 
have carried it on with the ruthless bestiality and deceit — not 
of super-men, but of savage beasts — is so manifest that it re- 
quires no further exposition. It must, however, be admitted 
that, though Nietzsche's ethical philosophy fails chiefly through 
a complete misunderstanding and misapplication of the Dar- 
winian principle of evolution, there are aspects of it which 
distinctly make for an advance of the human species. I even 
venture to believe that he would have been the first to repudiate 
the policy, and the methods of realising it, adopted by Germany 
in these latter years, as he would have been horrified by the 
ruthlessness and treachery which have been displayed. His own 
estimate of the specific character of German mentality and of 
German politics was a very low one. I also believe that his own 
personality, in so far as it was not warped and distorted by his 
pathological condition ending in insanity, with premonitory 
symptoms throughout the whole of his life, was refined and 
noble, actuated throughout by higher beneficent ideals. His 
works abound in deep and brilliant thoughts, sometimes clearly 
expressed, but often bedimmed and confused by emotions and 
pathological impulses over which he had no control, and fre- 
quently, if not generally, placed in a setting of irrational and 
exaggerated diction and reasoning which robbed them of truth 
and effectiveness. The value of his works, however, rests chiefly 
upon their literary and artistic qualities, which have ensured 
the wide popularity which they enjoy. Zarathustra will ever 
remain a masterpiece of German prose; though it contains much 
crude and nebulous thought — at times even insane nonsense — 
all the more deleterious to the mind of the reader because of the 
artistic beauty and force of its diction. 

ineptly answers "I do not know") can never impress an audience 
with his heroic character, any more than sacrifice and humility can 
be artistically conveyed by mere iteration of their virtues. The great 
critic Lessing, in the eighteenth century, had already shown that, 
while the figures of the Old Testament were as dramatic as those of 
ancient Greek mythology, those of Christian martyrology were 
essentially undramatic. 

14 — 2 



222 Appendix V 

Now, it must be admitted to be incontrovertible that the 
philosophical and ethical writings of Nietzsche have directly- 
produced the phrases indicated in the title of this article and 
what these phrases imply in regard to the mentality of the 
German nation. Since the War began, however, frequent at- 
tempts have been made in Germany, with a definite political 
purpose, to deny the great influence which Nietzsche has had 
upon the mentality of the present generation. We can under- 
stand the reasons for such an attempt, but we do not admit its 
truth. It would be difficult to find any book which has enjoyed 
such enormous popularity in Germany as Zarathustra, I can 
only record my own personal experiences during the occasional 
visits I paid to Germany in the 'nineties of the last century. 
I then found that among many of the young men, and even the 
young women, whom I met, Nietzschean ideas of morality were 
widely prevalent and were actually adopted as guides to con- 
duct. The same attempt has frequently been made to deny the 
influence of the writings of Bernhardi, as well as the writings 
and teachings of Treitschke, whose responsibility in fashioning 
the mentality of the German nation for this world- war, with its 
m.ethods of deliberate ruthlessness, has been amply demon- 
strated by numerous competent writers. Not only in Germany 
have such attempts been made to minimise their influence, but 
in neutral countries as well. So, for instance, the reviewer of 
my book Aristodemocracy , etc., in the New Republic of New 
York attempted to refute my own affirmation of the great 
influence of Treitschke's teaching, and maintained that his 
Politik (I am not aware that he ever published such a book, 
though his popular lectures on that subject for many years 
drew large audiences) did not enjoy a wide circulation. My 
reply to such an assertion was, and is, that all the historical 
and political writings of Treitschke did have a comparatively 
wide circulation in Germany, and that, as editor of the Preus- 
sische Jahrbiicher, he had greater facilities for reaching a wider 
circle of German readers than any other publicist or historian 
in that country. But it must never be forgotten that a Pro- 
fessor in one of the great German Universities has more direct 
means of transmitting his opinions throughout the whole nation 



The Kaiser and " the Will to ... " 223 

than in any other country. In the first place, all schoolmasters 
are obliged to pass a "State examination" in order to follow 
their profession, and must have attended courses of lectures in 
the Universities. For at least forty years, thousands of these 
students attended Treitschke's lectures, thereafter transmitting 
his opinions and principles among their own pupils of every 
class and in every part of Germany. But, not only these school- 
masters, jurists, politicians, and bureaucrats, but university 
students of every branch of study were eager listeners of his 
forceful and eloquent lectures. During the three and a half 
years (from 1873 to 1876) when I was a student at German 
universities, I remember how, at Heidelberg, his more popular 
lectures on Politik were attended on an average by about five 
hundred students from every Faculty, out of a total number 
of less than a thousand students then attending that University. 
These numbers were greatly increased after he became a pro- 
fessor at Berlin in 1874 and was made a member of the Reichs- 
tag. 

It need not be insisted upon how effective such a personal 
agency for the transmission of opinion and doctrine is in a 
country with such an effective educational system, in which, 
moreover, the willing receptivity for intellectual teaching among 
the whole population is a leading characteristic of decided 
national advantage. What thus applies to the teachings of 
Treitschke also applies to the more abstract speculative 
teaching of pure philosophy, such as that of Hegel, which filters 
through the mentality of students who become officials or 
professional men or educated men of affairs, and through 
them even into the minds of the illiterate persons with whom 
they come in contact and over whom they have some influence. 
Moreover, it was especiall}'^ the class to which the average school- ^ 
master belonged which consisted of the most faithful readers of 
Nietzsche and became his most ardent disciples. 

TI 

The foregoing remarks on the philosophic and ethical systems 
prevailing in Germany before the War were not made for the 
purpose of summarising their distinctive characteristics, nor 



224 Appendix V 

even of proving that they had a considerable influence in pro- 
ducing this war. Similar attempts have already been made by 
several competent writers. 

My chief central aim in this article has been to illustrate with 
emphasis, by means, in the first instance, of the origin and 
frequent application of that unusual and popular phrase " The 
Will to...," the direct and most effective influence of the 
highest abstract theory and philosophy upon the mentalit}'- and 
the actual life of a whole nation. That the German people is 
thus peculiarly receptive to such an intellectual and moral pro- 
cess, is probably true; and, whatever their most reprehensible 
weaknesses and vices may be, this remains one of their chief 
qualities and virtues as a nation. But it would be the greatest 
and most vital error to believe that they represent a unique 
instance of this national characteristic among the nations of 
our day, or of any other period in history. Every nation is thus 
influenced by the supreme expression of philosophic and re- 
ligious thought in the generation preceding it, and in its con- 
temporary life. Philosophy holds the mirror of intellectuality, 
of thought, of principles and motives before the eyes. of the 
peoples of each age. Its immediate function is — ^to use the 
language of our enemies — to bring their Zeitgeist, their Time- 
Spirit, to the consciousness of the people. It is more than a 
platitude to maintain that "to know thyself" is the first step 
towards rational and beneficent action and progress. The higher 
the civilisation and the more real the true democracy, the 
greater is the efiectiveness and power of such a Zeitgeist, as well 
as the need for its correct formulation, and the more direct 
becomes its action. With the growing diffusion of knowledge, 
since the invention of the printing press and other inventions 
which have facilitated rapid transportation and inter-communi- 
cation, the gap between the formulation of truth and higher 
ideas and ideals, on the one hand, and their realisation in the 
life of a whole nation, on the other, becomes shortened and 
effectually bridged over. This has been the case in the past, 
and will be still more so in the future. In mediaeval society 
the Church was mainly effective in p^forming this supreme 
purpose of national education. The doctrines and dogmas of 



The Kaiser and " the Will to ... " 225 

the Church, as well as its ethical teaching, were transmitted, 
not only through the ordained and authoritative priests, but 
through that wide and influential class called "clerks," i.e. 
those possessed of letters and learning among the mass of the 
ilHterates. Throughout the whole world there was a vast 
fraternity of the learned linked together into effective unity 
by one universal language, Latin. In the whole history of 
civilisation, no three men more fully understood and appreciated 
the value of true philosophy, morality and reUgion, and especi- 
ally the direct and supreme force of education, than did Eras- 
mus, Sir Thomas More, and Colet. Their conception of a true 
reformation was entirely based upon Humanism, beginning 
with the clerks, and, through them, of all the peoples of 
Christendom. If this were true in the age of the Reformation, 
it is true to a stiU greater and more intense degree in our 
own immediate age, the Great Age of Reformation for the 
future. 

But if we are right in ascribing such direct power to what, 
in one word, we must call Philosophy, it becomes still more 
urgently true that the highest exposition of our "Time-Spirit" 
should be the right one, the true philosophy, the true morality. 
For it was the false philosoph}^ {or at least the distorted under- 
standing and application of the true philosophy) which has 
brought ruin to Germany and unspeakable disaster to the world. 
Above all, our system of morals must not lag behind the con- 
sciousness and the needs of our age; but must, on the contrary, 
summarise what is best in the conception of our higher ideals, 
and prepare for, facilitate and accelerate progress in the direction 
of these ideals. This is the primary and essential requisite for a 
Moral Reconstruction of our age, and for the preparation of a 
glorious new age for posterity. 

In spite of the many national virtues of which the British 
people, with all due modesty, may be justly proud, it is in this 
sphere of public life and of national education that we are singu- 
larly at fault. Our national spirit of conservatism, coupled with 
our keen appreciation of the actualities of life, of experience, 
of the unbiassed use of common-sense in dealing with the facts 
and problems before us, our straightforward energy, courage 



226 Appendix V 

and perseverance in facing the difficulties to be overcome, as 
we faced our enemies in fight, our consequent hatred of sham 
and of cant (whether patently manifest or hidden in the garb 
of rhetoric or deep philosophy) — all these, and much more, have 
made us suspicious of abstractions, of higher thought, theory 
and philosophy, until at times we even hate or despise them. 
These are the facts which led Meredith to summarise this 
national idiosyncrasy in the phrase "England's Hatred of 
Thought." This is true in spite of our having actually pro- 
duced, perhaps, the greatest individual thinkers of the world. 
Not so the French with their courageous, nay, passionate, 
almost artistic, love of ideas, of new ideas, and their child-like 
exuberance and boldness in at once daring to carry them into 
realisation with heedless and fearless disregard of the existing 
order of things. Not so the Germans with their love of syste- 
matic thought, their almost mystic and romantic attachment 
to deductive generalisation, and their patient docility in pene- 
trating and marshalling the world of facts in their true order 
under the supremacy of a regulating and dominating idea. The 
idea and the system become great realities to them, and they 
exact submission to their autocratic sway, as for many genera- 
tions they have been trained to obedience to their master and 
their over-lords in their political and social life. Civil obedience 
and military discipline may bear supremely good fruit when in 
peace we have the perfect benevolent and sane autocrat, and 
in war the courageously wise and wisely energetic general. In 
the spiritual world of the mind and character the persuasive 
rule of true philosophy also becomes a wholly beneficent 
autocrat. 

If Germany has suffered, and still suffers, from the tyranny 
of its false philosophy, we suffer, and will suffer, from the 
absence of any philosophy. 

I cannot refrain from recording my own personal impressions 
of the national characteristics with which we are dealing. When, 
more than forty-two years ago, I settled in this country, having 
been born and bred in America, and having studied for over 
three years at German Universities, what struck me most as the 
leading and national characteristic of .this country and its 



The Kaiser and " the Will to ... " 227 

people, in contradistinction to that of the German people among 
whom I had been living — to summarise it in one phrase — was 
"The Force of Tradition." Tradition was all-powerful, and 
could only be modified by a process of organic evolution, in no 
wa^^ manifestly subject to even those leading thinkers and 
workers who might directly or indirectly have effected the 
evolutionary change or given it direction. In Germany and 
also in France, and even in the United States in certain depart- 
ments, the process of change and innovation was directly 
identified with some leading personality and his work. But in 
Germany it was the philosopher and professor; in France the 
political writer and orator, as well as the poet, the man of 
letters; and in the United States, it was chiefly the business- 
man. In England the great formative causes appear to me to 
be the political traditions, more or less adequately represented 
by parliamentary parties, and the national institutions and 
customs arising out of the continuous life of the people and re- 
acting upon it. By a natural process, if not a "Social Law," 
the occupations which conferred the greatest social distinction 
and prestige attracted to themselves eventually, both in quality 
and in quantity, the talent of a nation or of a community : so, 
at least in those golden days of the immediate past, politics 
seemed to attract the talent and genius of England, as it also 
conveyed the greatest influence and prestige. In the Germany 
of those days the universities and the army conferred the same 
prestige. As years went by, the army encroached upon the uni- 
versities with the Bureaucracy holding a good second between 
them. But in England I was chiefly struck with this directly 
effective "force of tradition" in the customs emanating from, 
or grouping round, the different communal and social organisa- 
tions and their manifest corporate bodies; and this was so in 
both serious work and lighter play. As regards the latter, the 
whole world of sport, with its varied manifestations in all forms 
of physical enjoyment and its corporate organisation, appeared 
to be, and appears so still, one of the most potent formative 
elements in giving direction to the social life of the entire com- 
munity, as well as to the character of public morals. I have 
more than once in the past (a year and a half ago in the pages 



228 Appendix V 

of this Review) 1 insisted on the supreme influence of athletics, 
the sports and pastimes of England, upon the character of the 
British people. May the good that is in them always survive 
and be retained for the welfare of the English nation and of the 
British Empire ! 

In all these organisations the immediate force of tradition is 
supreme and manifest. It applies, not only to the various 
County teams and Clubs, which are good or bad as their cor- 
porate character and atmosphere are confirmed or maintained 
or changed by gradual and imperceptible evolution; but in 
every other corporate body. Schools and universities with their 
houses and colleges, ships and regiments, and even their com- 
panies, boroughs and counties with their several organisations 
for work and play, societies and clubs, even factories and the 
business firms, are all ruled by certain traditions, firmly estab- 
lished and directly effective, advancing or degenerating by a 
gradual process, the immediate personal origin of which may 
not always be distinguishable, — but all of them subject to the 
Force of Tradition. Now this is a great force and a great asset 
to a nation, if its effectiveness tends to the good; but it may 
become a weakness, a stumbling-block to improvement and 
progress, a negation even of the original purpose for which the 
corporate body was called into existence. If it tends to the bad, 
still more so if the tendency is clearly evil, even if the activity 
and the tradition by which it is dominated and directed no 
longer conform to the actual need of the social life in which the 
corporate body acts, the slow and organic process of change has 
its undoubted advantages. But in this long and halting period 
of adaptation intervening between a crying need and its realisa- 
tion or amendment, much irreparable harm may be done and 
suffering undergone. " On a toujours les defauts de ses qualites " 
is undoubtedly true. But in spite of the qualities, the faults 
remain faults, and may be most maleficent. We must see to it 
that the forces which fashion our national life, whether by 
tradition or by conscious design, theory, and law, harmonise 

^ See the Nineteenth Century and After for December, 1916, "The 
Social Gulf between England and Germany," and April, 191 7, 
"Morality and German War Aimg." 



The Kaiser and " the Will to ... " 229 

with the consciousness of the age in which we live, respond to 
the needs of the actual times, and, above all, prepare the way 
for a better future. 

Now, if I have succeeded in showing how direct is the influence 
which German philosophical theories of ethics had in the making 
of Germany, and in producing this world-war and its methods 
of warfare, we can realise how, even among other nations, in- 
cluding ourselves, the theoretical foundations of national con- 
sciousness and morals are of supreme importance and effective- 
ness. Above all must we realise how supremely important it is 
that our ethical philosophy should be the right one. It is be- 
cause of this that "Moral Reconstruction" constitutes the most 
cr\dng need of our age, not only for Germany, but throughout 
the world, and especially so in this country^. 

I wish at once to make it quite clear that, though I hold (and 
have endeavoured in Aristodemocracy to prove it) that ethics 
and religion, never divorced, can never replace each other, I am 
equally convinced that religion, which is concerned with man's 
communion with his ultimate ideals, forms the foundation of 
moral and intellectual activities and strivings in the whole 
spiritual life of man. But religion does not then mean merely 
its doctrinal, sectarian or ritual (in the widest acceptation of the 
term) manifestations. All philosophy and all science lead up to, 
and are ultimately based upon, man's religion. But philosophy 
and science, in their specific development and their application 
to mental and material life, must be elaborated and advanced 
independently and with conscientious thoroughness in every 
age. The same claim must be made with regard to our system 
of morals. 

Now, what may be called the " system of catechismal ethics " 
is no longer adequate or effectual, first, because the catechism is 

^ I have developed my views on this subject in my book Avisto- 
democracy from the Great War back to Moses, Christ and Plato (1916); 
in Patriotism, National and International (191 7); What Germany is 
Fighting For (191 7); and in the present book of which this article 
forms an Appendix. Such books as Mr A. Glutton Brock's The 
Ultimate Belief., with its simple and yet exalted style and tone, serve 
as very useful moral and intellectual stimulants. 



230 Appendix V 

overshadowed by doctrinal teaching; and, while therefore con- 
fusing the youthful mind in the grasping of the elements of 
practical ethics of even the believers in the respective sectarian 
religions, it can in no way become a guide to the non-believers. 
These latter will therefore often enter life without any ethical 
instruction whatever. But, in the second place, it is no longer 
adequate, because each age develops a new form of ethics corre- 
sponding to, and completely harmonising with, the phase of 
social evolution attained, the needs which the actual times pro- 
duce, and the adaptation to the new conditions of progressive 
activity in preparing for a future age. It hardly requires lengthy 
and insistent demonstration to prove to every thoughtful person 
that the conceptions of truthfulness, honesty and honour, par- 
ticipation in public and political work, etc, etc., differ and 
advance or decline during the several ages of history, and even 
within a few generations. Theory and education must therefore 
keep pace with these historical changes ; and it is all-important 
for national sanity, truthfulness and progress that this should 
be so. 

As regards reconstruction in ethical theory — in spite of the 
establishment and advance in our times of the study called 
Sociology — it still remains an urgent necessity that the purely 
philosophical study of Ethics, pervaded by the highest philo- 
sophical spirit and method, should be essentially modified. 
This modification must take place in one definite direction. 
Hitherto, the philosophical study of Ethics has been almost 
exclusively concerned with the fundamental principles on 
which all Ethics rest, and, if not purely deductive or intro- 
spective, metaphysical and psychological, it has not been 
essentially inductive, observational and experimental — ^in spite 
of the fact that Kant distinguished the ethical department 
from all others in philosophy by assigning to his work on that 
subject the title Critique of Practical Reason in contradistinction 
to the Critique of Pure Reason. The main task for the ethical 
student of the future will be to discover, establish and formu- 
late, in the purest spirit of philosophy, the actual moral con- 
sciousness of the age in which he is living and, on the ground of 
inductive and thorough observation, arid even experiment, to 



The Kaiser and " the Will to ... " 23 1 

base his ethical generahsation on these. Having performed this 
primarily necessary task, he can turn back to more complete 
co-ordination with psychological and metaphysical principles, 
and push forward to their apphcation in order to produce a 
more perfect life. 

A whole field of vital and interesting study and discussion is 
opened out to the philosopher — the field of definite inquiry into 
life, private and public. Hitherto this domain of inquiry has 
been left to the casual attention of the literary essayist, and 
even of the poet and novelist, or to the philanthropist and social 
reformer. The work of the modern novelist, beginning with 
Dickens, Zola and the American writer, Norris, has often been 
inspired by the aim to expose great social evils and needs, and 
to advocate their reform. What is required from the philo- 
sophical moralist is, that he should, with all the highly accurate 
apparatus of his methods, apply himself to the establishment of 
the dominating and valid ethical principles in the life of his age. 
Truthfulness, Honour, Honesty (including commercial and 
poHtical honesty). Cleanliness, Charity — ^in short the principles 
guiding human action in every department of modern life — 
should be established in their adequate modern form by un- 
biassed and searching observation and inquiry and co-ordinated 
with the whole ethical system of our days. The controversies 
turning round the fundamental bases of morality, in the meta- 
physical or psychological spirit, whether it be idealism, realism, 
egoism or altruism, are not to absorb the whole or the greater 
part of his study and work; but the actual establishment, for 
instance, of commercial and industrial morality, in the practices 
of finance and the Stock Exchange, the promoting and the 
working of great Stock Companies and syndicates, the differ- 
ences between investment and speculation on margin, etc., etc., 
these and similar problems should be subjected to the most 
thorough and unbiassed ethical investigation by men best fitted 
for such work by natural ability and thorough training. So, 
too, the duties of the citizen (which I am pleased to record have 
already received considerable attention from competent think- 
ers and writers) are to be impressed upon the people in all 
phases of public education. These and innumerable other in- 



232 Appendix V 

stances are those which truly concern us in our times; and in 
a simple and intelligible form are to be summarised so that they 
can be brought home to the average understanding and can be 
effectually incorporated in our educational system. Catechismal 
ethics leave us entirely in the dark on these important issues in 
modern life. The moral consciousness of the pubhc must be 
brought up to date. 

Now, leaving the theoretical side, we finally come to the 
practical department of education. It would be unfair and dis- 
ingenuous were I, from the outset, to be met by the common- 
place and superficial objection: that knowledge of ethical terms 
or of ethical practical principles conveyed in text-books, cannot 
of themselves make a man good ; as mere learning cannot make 
a man wise. But even Nature's wise man is not turned into a 
fool by being made acquainted, in his early or later education, 
with the rudiments of learning and science, which affect the 
whole of our civilisation. Reading and writing, grammar and 
arithmetic, history and geography, will not destroy'- the intellect 
and its efiiciency of even a man born with mother-wit and 
brain-power and possessed of ordinary common-sense. The 
child favoured at birth with a nature tending towards virtue, 
kindliness and strength of character ought to be instructed in 
what the society about him considers right and wrong, and 
ought not to be left to his instincts and passions. More than 
this, he must be made acquainted with the highest prevailing 
moral tenets of his own age. This the catechisms of the present 
day as published by every one of the religious sects cannot do 
adequately. Above all, it is necessar3^ to remember that a large 
proportion of children in our large towns and country villages 
do not attend Sunday school, and are not even instructed in 
existing catechisms. Nor have they homes in which, by definite 
instruction or by commendable example, their morals are in- 
stilled and improved. To suggest but one instance, the supreme 
duty to be truthful. In millions of cases this fundamental in- 
junction has never been adequately and convincingly impressed 
upon the child, either in town or country. It remains one of the 
most crying needs that modern and thoroughly adequate and 
efficient Ethics and Civics be taught, and that every citizen be. 



The Kaiser and " the Will to ... " 233 

at some period of education, instructed in the morals of his own 
age. It goes without saying that such instruction should not be 
philosophical or theoretical, but eminently simple and practical, 
that abstractions and generalisations be avoided, and that every 
injunction be brought home by telling instalnces and illustra- 
tions appealing to the personalities of the pupils. Honour and 
Truthfulness, Manliness and Courage, Cleanliness of body and 
of mind. Industry and Self-control, Generosity and Thrift, 
Public Duty and Pubhc Spirit, can and must thus be inculcated 
in the young and developed in the adult population. Every 
teacher of average intelligence will be competent to do this, as 
well as every clergyman or minister. All sects are surely agreed 
with regard to such moral injunctions; but the clergyman or 
minister must appear in the school as the teacher of the Ethics 
which are universally admitted, and not as the upholder of a 
definite set of religious doctrines, which might antagonise, or 
exclude from his teaching, the pupils who are to be instructed 
in the Civics and Ethics of a civilised community. "By their 
fruits shall ye know them"; and such fruits will come abun- 
dantly to the nation which cultivates both fruit and flower in 
its national life. 

This i$ one of the most vital needs of National Reconstruc- 
tion, and, if not more pressing than our economic reconstruc- 
tion, is at least of equal importance with it for the future health, 
peace and progress of the Empire. 



THE END 



CAMBRIDGE : PRINTED BY 

J. B. PEACE, M.A., 
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 



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